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Comment by gordaco | Hacker News Reader

>>I feel liberated by not having a strong type system restricting my options.

>If you feel restricted by a type system, you're using it wrong. A type system is a useful tool, not an impediment. It only prevents you from doing wrong things.

I'm always baffled about how people say that using a dynamic language feels "liberating". I feel completely the opposite; I have to be extremely more careful with a dynamic language since either there is no compiler or it can't detect many errors, so I have to do it myself (because, and this is a very important lesson for absolutely everyone without exceptions: you will commit mistakes, no matter how good you are or how good you think you are). Getting rid of static typing feels to me like, above all, getting rid of a lot of very useful guarantees.

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Aren't these two equivalent statements? Liberty to do any particular thing, ever, increases the ability to do something wrong. And so requires more caution. That doesn't stop restrictions that would alleviate said caution from being overbearing themselves. (Maybe they aren't always overbearing, either way...)

> Liberty to do any particular thing, ever, increases the ability to do something wrong.

The difference is that "liberty" tends to increase one's ability to do both right and wrong. Dynamic typing tends to only increase one's ability to do wrong.

> Dynamic typing tends to only increase one's ability to do wrong.

Apparently you place no value on programmer time. Why should I have to waste time with type declarations that add no benefit to my program? Why should I have to construct an artificial type hierarchy just so I can write common code to deal with two different kinds of objects that are duck-type compatible but don't happen to share a common base type that the type system recognizes?

I agree that there are certain kinds of applications where static typing can be a benefit that is worth spending the extra programmer time; but the claim you are making is much stronger than that.

Static typing can save a lot of time otherwise debugging later, and really isn't that much of a time investment.

I agree, for certain types of applications. But as a general statement applying to all types of applications, I disagree strongly.

Static typing gives me the liberty to explicitly define much more complex ideas in ways that leverage the compiler to create powerful and beneficial systems that would otherwise be untenable in a language in which one could not leverage the intelligence of the type system to offset their human limitations.

This is why unit testing took over the dynamic language world more than a decade ago.

And at least in Perl, which have a bit of extensible syntax, you can declare parameter types of methods/functions. That is especially a good idea for external APIs to libraries, etc.

All tools have quirks, which forces a bit of change in how you use them. You have to look at the total sum of these effects. How much extra days will it take to learn? How much will the work arounds cost you? Etc.

Granted, e.g. JavaScript have more weirdness than should be possible -- but is is fast, fun and has lots of use cases.

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