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Comment by alvatar | Hacker News Reader

Once again, types are way overrated. However, Shen is an interesting new Lisp to watch. Needs a more open community, though (like a free book and/or deep documentation).

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> Once again, types are way overrated.

Care to expand on this? I'm curious, what is your opinion and preferred platform/languages?

I'm not the parent, but in noncritical applications an accommodating compiler/interpreter will speed up development. Few advocate such an attitude for critical applications, but whether all compile-time checking should be done in terms of types or not is an open question.

Types speed up my development: they obviate a certain kind of unit tests. If you weren't going to write those unit tests without the types, anyway, then it helps because you now catch type mismatches at compile time instead of runtime.

The question is whether types are the most productive area to focus on when developing better compile-time checks. Maybe it would be better to design languages that solve problems by other means.

With Shen you can use them when you want. So you can create things fast and add types / tests / proofs when you want and when it seems prudent.

Have you never observed this discussion before?

> "I'm not the parent, but in noncritical applications an accommodating compiler/interpreter will speed up development."

What does "speed up development" mean? Does it mean "as fast as you can push it to your users"? Does it mean "as soon as it passed QA"? Does it mean "as soon as we receive no further bug reports on it for at least 6 months"?

> types are way overrated.

Please show your scientifically rigiorous evidence. Because it appears very few other people have any (either way), so at the very least you could earn a prize if you shared yours! :)

> Because it appears very few other people have any (either way)

If there is no evidence either way, yet every other developer raves about types all the time (the way "connaisseurs" rave about fine wine and expensive scotch despite being unable to objectively tell the difference), doesn't it follow that types are overrated?

That's the point. Here is further discussion of this: http://blog.metaobject.com/2014/06/the-safyness-of-static-ty...

Wow. Way to bias the discussion by segueing into to wine and/or whisky! We're not discussing neither wine nor whisky, so... maybe you'll dispense with the hyperbole?

What is your actual point and what is your evidence?

How about "A Large Scale Study of Programming Languages and Code Quality in Github" by Baishakhi, et al. [1]? That shows a weak correlation between fewer bugs and static typing. There's a stronger correlation between strong typing and fewer bugs.

[1] http://macbeth.cs.ucdavis.edu/lang_study.pdf

I am familiar with that study and while I have serious issues with the methodology, I do not think it says what you think it does[1].

[1] If you think it refutes my point, that is.

The community is bizarre, I will not lie, but the original developer did release a book quite recently using Shen, although Shen might not be the focus.

http://www.shenlanguage.org/LPC/lpc.html

There are two books you can buy ; the latter one uses Shen; the first one (The Book of Shen) teaches you Shen. If you know Lisp & Prolog, it should not be hard to pick it up from examples and the source code. The book is worth it, I just wish there was a digital version; I think it would sell a lot more.

I've even come to the conclusion that I don't really like dead-tree books any more. I mean, I like them, as a luxury (and I buy used books) -- but since I'll have a reading device/laptop anyway -- any dead tree books are just a waste of resources (trees, print, packaging, transport, storage, transport...).

Now, books have been optimized really, really well -- and actually take up remarkably few resources to make -- but as long as I'll have a device on which to read e-books anyway -- all those resources are wasted.

Just give me a DRM-free epub version, and I'm much more likely to buy your book.

The community is small but open; agree on the docs.

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