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Comment by sabellito | Hacker News Reader

Jose Valim is one of the few people in the industry that I trust to implement a type system correctly. The other one is Anders Hejlsberg.

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Valim seems to do a really great job stewarding Elixir initiatives with the help of experts, like his collaboration with Sean Moriarty (author of Genetic Algorithms in Elixir) leading to Nx and now his recruiting Dr. Castagna (a PL researcher) and Guillaume Duboc (PhD candidate) to implement gradual typing.

Why, exactly? He has no proven experience implementing one as far as I know. I don't think he's a particularly worse choice than anyone else but I don't understand why he'd be a particularly good one.

Hejlsberg is an interesting example. Did he do the original typescript type system that was unsound or was that someone else and he cleaned up the mess?

TypeScript's type system is, and it will always be, unsound by design [1].

Working with these constraints and still being able to deliver what they did is nothing short of incredible. They had the maturity and experience to ship something that wasn't Yet Another Copy Of Java's Type System, like Sorbet and Dart, for example.

[1] https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/type-compatibil...

(Assuming this isn’t trolling)

Yes, AFAIK, Hejlsberg did the original TS type system. He, from what I can tell, wanted to build a usable type system for JS than any theoretical soundness. He seems to have succeeded in that.

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