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Comment by archerx | Hacker News Reader

>catches a mistake you'd have missed or your IDE out you used the wrong type.

Do people really have this issue? My errors are never type related and when they are the console tells me immediately and the exactly line to fix.

What I need is a StupidScript to save me from the stupidity of my logic errors…

Like for example I’m working on a custom game engine for a web game I’m making, I’m having issues with the rewards unlock at the end of the match. The code is “correct” the right types go to the right place but there is a logic error somewhere that prevents certain rewards from unlocking.

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Types give you much more than just getting an error early when you call the wrong method on an object or pass a string where you needed a number.

Once you have written down the shape of the data flowing through your program in a way that a compiler can check you'll be able to reason about the whole program better and you might find issues much faster.

I think that types can directly help a lot with logic errors as well: one of the things people say most often when discussing typed programming language is that you can make illegal states unrepresentable, which means that you can encode logic into the type system itself.

That might be interesting, I'll check for some examples.

> My errors are never type related

Over the years I feel like I have read this comment at least ten times from different commenters (and the second time this month) and I cannot really fathom it. I consider myself a pretty good developer, and I have type errors many times a day. It is perhaps the most common error I encounter, and thankfully one of of easiest to fix with static typing.

By far the biggest recent productivity gain I have made using types is by generating the types along with client code for APIs via a swagger doc. I cannot overstate the value in seeing the types update when the backend devs have changed the API, and getting a compiler error when it doesn’t match with your code. By having the types the next developer after me is going to be spending far less time getting up to speed with the codebase.

I started programming with static types early in my career so perhaps I have become wired to lean heavily on the type system.

My first programming language was C/C++ and I learned dynamically typed languages after, I still prefer the dynamically type languages. I still do a lot of C/C++ code for micro controllers and the types are so annoying, either create a function for both ints and floats, templates or you cast the type. It's all so tedious, boring and uninteresting.

I have made a lot of code that works on a lot of third party APIs (The major LLMS, Image generators, E-commerce stuff) and yea it's all been easy breezy and never thought I wish I had types.

Different people just work in different ways.

> Do people really have this issue?

Yes. The point is that without type-safety and a compile-time type check, you have absolutely no way of knowing if you have an error like this until you hit that piece of code.

The very fact that you think you don't have those kinds of issues just exemplifies how you actually are just ignorant to all the type errors you have in your code because you haven't tested enough, hit the right edge case, etc.

I have bunch of code/programs that have been running live on prod for years that are super stable with no errors that have been reported but what do I know?

> the console tells me immediately and the exactly line to fix.

Uh, yeah, that's a runtime error. Type safety tells you the error before you even hit save, let alone run and test. It's a wildly faster loop.

I'm still going to run it every change and those errors are rare and quick to fix.

Something simple like assigning a string when it should be a number won't cause an error on the console but will cause bugs very hard to catch.

At that point sir you would have no job. Your job is logic safety

My job is to produce more value than I cost. Otherwise you're going to get laid off anyways.

Atta boy

https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.4938275797.9978/fposter,medi...

That's why I test the code and solve the logical issues? The joke was that the language would be smart enough to catch the less obvious stupid mistakes instead of obvious to solve type bugs.

someone once said something to me that stuck: computers are stupid. they do exactly and only what you tell them

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