I don’t understand how types could be time consuming.
I agree, but I imagine dynamic type fans would say they don’t understand why explicitly stating types can be helpful.
Optional typing is pretty useful, especially if the tooling is such that it catches most issues. I use Python’s optional typing quite a bit, and my general approach is to add types if the function is intended to be reused or if it took more than three seconds to figure out what it does. We also use Typescript, and typing isn’t necessary there either.
If your type system is too strict, it can be really annoying to work with and make simple things take longer. If it’s too loose, you’ll introduce stupid bugs.
If your type system is too strict, it can be really annoying to work with and make simple things take longer.
Swift has entered the chat.
Yeah I think it’s a misunderstanding. There’s no way they aren’t encountering issues from dynamic types.
Some things are very easy to do in loosly typed languages - just as letting a function take a string or int, and then parsing that string into an int if a string was passed in. In a loosly typed language you can just call something like
if typeof(input)but in a strongly typed language you often need a lot more boiler plate and extra wrapper types to say the function can only take an int or string - for instance in rust you might need to wrap them in a enum first or some how create a trait and implement that for each types.This is quite a bit of extra upfront cost some of the time that really rubs people that are used to loosly typed languages the wrong way. So they think it is slow to work with types. But what they never seem to count is the countless hours you save knowing that when you read a value from something and pass it to a function that wants only an int, that the value is an int and you dont end up getting
2 + "2" = "22"and other suprising bugs in your program. Which results in less time debugging and writing tests for weird cases the compiler does not allow.But all that extra time if often not counted as that is dissociated from the original problem at hand. And they are already used to this cost - people often notice a new cost, but don’t notice a possibly bigger saving else where.
I never understood this argument. If your function is supposed to take an int, then parse your string before calling it?
There are reasons you might want to, such as you are constructing something that has a few different ways to create it. Like maybe a date, can parse it from a string, pass in each bit as a separate argument, take in a Unix timestamp.
A lot of languages encourage this with constructors as you can often only have one.
IMO it is far better to just have different functions for each type you want to build something from like how it is done in rust.
But when you come from a language that encourages the opposite it can seem clunky to have to define separate functions for each. And it can take a while to accept the different way of working.
From some of my own conversations with people they don’t find it useful as a solo dev because they have to read the docs for dependencies even with types, and they only ever have to deal with their own code which they know we’ll enough that they see types as a waste of time.
