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0 pointszbentley1mo ago0 comments

I suspect that this is breaking type systems out onto separate axes: strong/weak and static/dynamic. Many consider Python to be strong/dynamic.

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em-bee1mo ago· 2 in thread

depending on the definition of static and dynamic, go could arguably be described as static (personally, i prefer declarative, as static is generally defined as something that i understand to be true for C but not for go), but that still does not make it weak.

antonvs1mo ago

I'm saying Go has a weak type system. This was apparently an intentional choice by the authors. Go doesn't even have sum types, which are an extremely basic, foundational feature of type systems. Even C had an equivalent in its union types.

"Weak type system" means that there are many restrictions on what constitutes a valid program that can't be expressed in Go, that can be expressed in languages with stronger type systems, like Rust, Haskell, or even Java and C#.

em-bee1mo ago

ok, fair enough, what actually interests me is why in your opinion it is weak.

in my understanding, weak typing comes from values being interpreted differently or are silently converted based on how they are used. php taking strings with numeric values when used in a math operation is a form of weak typing.

if that is not what you mean then you are using a different definition for weak typing. that's ok, i don't want to argue about what is the right definition, but i am interested in the definition you are using.

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