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0 pointschristopheml8y ago0 comments

My main progamming language at the time is Java, and the amount of assistance my IDE provides is astonishing (to the surprise of no one, it's IntelliJ). The confidence strong automatic refactors provide is of great help when managing large codebases.

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amirouche8y ago

I agree that static typing helps reading comprehension and that IDEs like pycharm help getting into big code bases, that said, at the end of the day, when you know the code both the IDE and static typing are getting in the way. Actually, I never saw anybody as quick as people using simple editors like emacs and vim. GUI is getting in the way of the programmers intent. Static typing is a hindrance in front of refactoring. Unit tests is the only truth that matters, static typing or not.

always_good8y ago

You're kinda damning it with faint praise when you say that you can use dynamically typed languages on small projects that fit in your head (and are also probably written by a single developer).

You can pretty much use any language in that scenario. But the chickens come to roost around day 30+ or so.

icebraining8y ago

A large project is a poorly decoupled set of small projects.

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ubernostrum8y ago

Personally I'd only use a language like C or C++ or Java for a tiny puny baby child's toy program. They're fundamentally unfit for real-world codebases.

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naasking8y ago

> Unit tests is the only truth that matters, static typing or not.

Well that's provably false, because there exist properties that you can type check that literally can't be verified via unit tests, even in principle. For instance, race and deadlock freedom.

tome8y ago

> Static typing is a hindrance in front of refactoring.

Are you kidding? Python programming's my day job but Haskell is an order of magnitude easier to refactor.

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