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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

With all due respect, you really do not understand these protocols if you think “just use TCP and ECC” addresses my complaints.

Again, it’s not that I have an issue with static types “not protecting you”, I am saying that you have to encode for this uncertainty regardless of the language you use. The way you typically encode for that uncertainty is to use an algebraic data type like Maybe or Optional. Checking against a Maybe for every field ends up being the same checks you would be doing with a dynamic language.

I don’t really feel the need to list out my full resume, but I do think it is very likely that I understand type systems better than you do.

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Fair enough, though I feel so entirely differently that your position baffles me.

Gleam is still new to me, but my experience writing parsers in Haskell and handling error cases succinctly through functors was such a pleasant departure from my experiences in languages that lack typeclasses, higher-kinded types, and the abstractions they allow.

The program flowed happily through my Eithers until it encountered an error, at which point that was raised with a nice summary.

Part of that was GHC extensions though they could easily be translated into boilerplate, and that only had to be done once per class.

Gleam will likely never live to that level of programmer joy; what excites me is that it’s trying to bring some of it to BEAM.

It’s more than likely your knowledge of type systems far exceeds mine—I’m frankly not the theory type. My love for them comes from having written code both ways, in C, Python, Lisp, and Haskell. Haskell’s types were such a boon, and it’s not the HM inference at all.

> ends up being the same checks you would be doing with a dynamic language

Sure thing. Unless dev forgets to do (some of) these checks, or some code downstream changes and upstream checks become gibberish or insufficient.

I know everyone says that this is a huge issue, and I am sure you can point to an example, but I haven’t found that types prevented a lot of issues like this any better than something like Erlang’s assertion-based system.

When you say "any better than" are you referring to the runtive vs comptime difference?

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