undefined | Better HN

0 pointsnomel3y ago0 comments

> I honestly can't understand why people are so obsessed about types

It's a very powerful sanity check that lets me write correct code faster, avoiding stupid bugs that the unit tests will also, eventually, find.

And, to me, reading the code is much much nicer. Types provide additional context to what's going on, at first glance, so I don't have to try to guess what something is, based on its name:

    results: list[SomeAPIResult] = some_api.get_results()

is much easier to grock.

0 comments

hbrn3y ago

> I don't have to try to guess what something is, based on its name

It's probably just a bad example, but in case it isn't:

Sounds like you ended up at the same place. You went from guessing what is some_api.get_results(), based on it's name, to guessing what is SomeAPIResult, also based on it's name.

If some_api is your library, then you could have just added type hints to get_results() and let type inference do it's job.

If it's a third party library, then using your custom SomeAPIResult means that code is becoming alien to other engineers that worked with that library in the past. It might be worth it, but it's definitely controversial. You probably should've done it with stubs anyway.

nomelOP3y ago

> guessing what is SomeAPIResult

I disagree. It’s not a guess, it is precisely what it is, where the variable name is free to betray me. A sane IDE/linter will tell me if my local assumption is incorrect, where a variable called result_SomeAPIResult relies on an assumed, possibly ancient, state of reality.

hbrn3y ago

You do realize nobody writes code like that, right? Even in static typing land people rely on type inference.

list[SomeAPIResult] in your example is redundant. You can get all the benefits of types without it.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsnomel3y ago0 comments

> I honestly can't understand why people are so obsessed about types

It's a very powerful sanity check that lets me write correct code faster, avoiding stupid bugs that the unit tests will also, eventually, find.

And, to me, reading the code is much much nicer. Types provide additional context to what's going on, at first glance, so I don't have to try to guess what something is, based on its name:

    results: list[SomeAPIResult] = some_api.get_results()

is much easier to grock.

0 comments

hbrn3y ago

> I don't have to try to guess what something is, based on its name

It's probably just a bad example, but in case it isn't:

Sounds like you ended up at the same place. You went from guessing what is some_api.get_results(), based on it's name, to guessing what is SomeAPIResult, also based on it's name.

If some_api is your library, then you could have just added type hints to get_results() and let type inference do it's job.

nomelOP3y ago

> guessing what is SomeAPIResult

hbrn3y ago

You do realize nobody writes code like that, right? Even in static typing land people rely on type inference.

list[SomeAPIResult] in your example is redundant. You can get all the benefits of types without it.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse