undefined | Better HN

0 pointstaeric4y ago0 comments

I'm claiming that most of the complications that will actually influence many of the intrinsic choices of both, will be dictated by external factors. Static typing being an intrinsic fact of software, I couldn't tell you what most of the software I use, used.

Calling for lack of metaphor is interesting. In many ways, our industry is nothing but metaphors, so it is surprising for me to see them called down.

I agree that no metaphor is perfect. But, by that same logic, I would argue that no specified type is perfect. Especially if done so in a taxonomy that does not admit exceptions. (And again, I'm not against types.)

0 comments

Zababa4y ago

> Calling for lack of metaphor is interesting. In many ways, our industry is nothing but metaphors, so it is surprising for me to see them called down.

I don't think that's true. There are lots of metaphor because people love using metaphors, but it's not inherent to our industry. Abstraction is, but abstraction and metaphors are different. Metaphors seem to mostly come from blog-post type content, where people want to give you an intuition for something in less than 10 minutes. There's a really good article about this, in the context of monad tutorials, which are some of the most proheminent victims of these metaphors https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuiti....

> I agree that no metaphor is perfect. But, by that same logic, I would argue that no specified type is perfect. Especially if done so in a taxonomy that does not admit exceptions. (And again, I'm not against types.)

I would call types an abstraction rather than a metaphor, though I agree with you that they are not perfect, in that all abstractions trade precision and exhaustiveness for speed. There are interesting alternatives to this with property-based checking and whatever clojure.spec is, and type systems themsleves are getting better, but we're still not at perfection. And even then, I don't think we will ever reach it. The "best" type systems currently all seem to have some structural parts, and some nominal parts, so there's no silver bullet.

I mostly use types to avoid stupid mistakes (I make lots of typos, and Typescript helps a lot here), and to improve developer tooling. I'd like to try some approach with DDD and types, but my current company isn't big on DDD, so I can't really judge it. I also like using unit and integration tests. All of these make me feel safer when doing changes. But some people are fine with catching errors in production and quickly fixing them.

taericOP4y ago

What I meant in our industry being nothing but metaphor is basically me staring at so many OO taxonomies. Even if you ignore deep OO trees (and I think you should), it is hard not to see the way we define most data and simulations as anything other than a very formal metaphor.

That said, I was not trying to say that abstractions and types are directly metaphor. I agree with your points. My argument there was that, like metaphors, types/abstractions are never perfect.

I use types to avoid type errors. Which is a big class of error, to be sure. But they do little to help with logic errors, in my experience. And they are flat detrimental if they require pulling in more and more formalism to cover cases that are of increasingly limited ROI.

If anything, I think our industry would do well to embrace many of the modelling domains that allow use of SAT solvers to find answers. And I don't think I've ever seen a strongly typed one of those that wasn't hard to follow. (I am interested in counter examples.)