Hacker News Reader

Comment by phyrex | Hacker News Reader

Progressive typing of an untyped code base. Types that are too complex to represent in that type system.

Yep, adopting strict after the fact is a different conversation, but one that has been talked about a bunch and there is even tooling to support progressive adoption.

Types that are too complex... hmmmm - I'm sure this exists in domains other than the bullshit CRUD apps I write. So yeah, I guess I don't know what I don't know here. I've written some pretty crazy types though, not sure what TypeScript is unable to represent.

Progressive code QA in general is IMO an underexplored space. Thankfully linters have now largely given way to opinionated formatters (xfmt, black, clang-format) but in the olden days I wished there was a way to check in a parallel exemptions file that could be periodically revised downward but would otherwise function as a line in the sand to at least prevent new violations from passing the check.

I'd be interested in similar capabilities for higher-level tools like static analyzers and so on. The point is not to carry violations long term, but to be able to burn down the violations over time in parallel to new development work.

This is how we introduced and work with clang-tidy. We enabled everything we eventually want to have, then individually disabled currently failing checks. Every once in a while, someone fixes an item and removes it from the exclusion list. The list is currently at about half the length we started out with.

> not sure what TypeScript is unable to represent.

I want a type that represents a string of negative prime numbers alternating with palindromes, separated by commas.

Oh yeah, you have to get into branded types for this I think, which means a parsing step. Fair point.

Important note: TS doesn't let you enable strict mode on per-file basis. Flow allowed that.

  * Common functions such as parsing functions in languages that don't support function overloading

  * "equals" and other global functions.

Typescript have solutions for both of those problems: conditional types and generics

Reply on news.ycombinator.com