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0 pointsstcredzero9y ago0 comments

The benefits of typeful programming go beyond type safety. They also include: “economy of thought”, “fearless refactoring”, “less time wasted on fixing stupid mistakes”, etc.

Funny, but that's exactly what we Smalltalkers had in Smalltalk -- with far less of the "type system" enforced by the compiler and almost all of it in our heads. (That said, back in the day, we had tooling which was more advanced while also being more responsive, years ahead of everyone else, so our viewpoint might be skewed.)

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premium-concern9y ago

> with far less of the "type system" enforced by the compiler and almost all of it in our heads

That's why reasonable people want to have good type systems: People who think that they can keep the type system in their head are exactly the people whose opinion should be ignored.

catnaroek9y ago

> Funny, but that's exactly what we Smalltalkers had in Smalltalk

Smalltalk doesn't let you say “this object responds to message Foo only when used in this part of the program”. In other words, there's no separation of concerns.

> and almost all of it in our heads

What you realistically can't produce entirely in your head is a proof that your program is correct, unless the language is explicitly designed to lift part of this proof obligation. That's exactly the role of parametricity: to help you separate concerns, allowing you to prove one small thing at a time.

stcredzeroOP9y ago

Smalltalk doesn't let you say “this object responds to message Foo only when used in this part of the program”.

In VisualWorks, there were different two ways of writing a short script to verify this in a matter of seconds. You could also sometimes achieve this with a few cascaded searches through the Refactoring Browser.

catnaroek9y ago

> In VisualWorks, there were different two ways of writing a short script to verify this in a matter of seconds.

This doesn't scale to either large programs or programs not entirely written by yourself.

In ML, there's no need to search anything: the only admissible operations on a value are those sanctioned by its type.

> You could also sometimes achieve this with a few cascaded searches through the Refactoring Browser.

As a library author, you can't search code written by users of your library.

In ML, I can prove things not only about my own code, but also about how others may use it.

stcredzeroOP9y ago

This doesn't scale to either large programs or programs not entirely written by yourself.

My industry experience clearly shows that you're just flat wrong -- with multiple large systems written by other people over the span of over a decade.

As a library author, you can't search code written by users of your library.

What kind of nonsense is this? The library author doesn't need to do such a search! The library users in Smalltalk would do such searches. Access to source was the norm. Decompilation in Smalltalk is trivially perfect, excluding local variable names, so closed source was fairly pointless.

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premium-concern9y ago

> with far less of the "type system" enforced by the compiler and almost all of it in our heads

That's why reasonable people want to have good type systems: People who think that they can keep the type system in their head are exactly the people whose opinion should be ignored.

catnaroek9y ago

> Funny, but that's exactly what we Smalltalkers had in Smalltalk

Smalltalk doesn't let you say “this object responds to message Foo only when used in this part of the program”. In other words, there's no separation of concerns.

> and almost all of it in our heads

stcredzeroOP9y ago

Smalltalk doesn't let you say “this object responds to message Foo only when used in this part of the program”.

catnaroek9y ago

> In VisualWorks, there were different two ways of writing a short script to verify this in a matter of seconds.

This doesn't scale to either large programs or programs not entirely written by yourself.

In ML, there's no need to search anything: the only admissible operations on a value are those sanctioned by its type.

> You could also sometimes achieve this with a few cascaded searches through the Refactoring Browser.

As a library author, you can't search code written by users of your library.

In ML, I can prove things not only about my own code, but also about how others may use it.

stcredzeroOP9y ago

This doesn't scale to either large programs or programs not entirely written by yourself.

My industry experience clearly shows that you're just flat wrong -- with multiple large systems written by other people over the span of over a decade.

As a library author, you can't search code written by users of your library.

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