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0 pointsfnord1239y ago0 comments

What did you think I was talking about?

I guess there could be a few senses of types for a programming practitioner:

1. integral types (int, float, etc) 2. product types (structs, objects) 4. sum types (enums) 5. containers (vec, dict, list, etc).

Typeless types would be dicts of lists of dicts. i.e. shitty product types. e.g. `x = dict(y=1, dict(z=[1,2,dict(u='good data')]))`. Passing this to functions that want to get 'good data' out of the structure basically end up treating this as a type, if that makes sense.

If I understand kbenson's point, it's that sometimes this is better than a tower of babel of type hierarchies that you may have confronted in Java or C++ and you end up needing to ponder how to convert your IWiggleWoggleSupplierProvider into an IWoggleWiggleProviderSupplier even though they do almost the same thing and have the same data but somehow they have different inheritance hierarchies.

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dllthomas9y ago

There's a sense of types of "anything (computable?) you can statically say about your terms". Representation is just a part of this, and often not a very important one. "How can I use this?" is usually much more interesting.

From that perspective, "treating the shape of your dicts as its type" certainly makes sense - it determines how you can use it correctly. It's incidental that you're not encoding this information in the "type system" your language provides (and that may or may not be a good idea, depending - there are always tradeoffs and we've left an awful lot of context unspecified).

From the same perspective, if you can use your IWWSProvider and your IWWSSupplier identically, we can say that they're arguably not different types and only being treated so because someone has given the Java or C++ "type system" an incorrect specification.

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