this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Programming
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This is an professional experience thing.
Types support “programming at scale” - scale in the sense of larger code based or multiple people contributing.
If you’re hacking away at a script for a web page, then yeah, have at it.
If you’re supporting more than a few hundred lines of code or working on a team, you need types to codify and communicate information that can be verified with a compiler.
Whenever you see a larger codebase that is not strongly (or statically) typed, you generally will see unit tests that are verifying the types/structure of outputs.
As someone who has written some Python at work, whenever I need to work on some code without type hints, I spend way too much time trying to figure out what all the parameter types should be for functions. I can't be the only one doing this though, I've seen functions that assume their inputs are strings receiving
pathlib.Pathon some uncommon branch that sure enough errors on some obscure user inputs.I've been pushing mypy hard though. It's not perfect, but it works well enough that it's still worth using over not using. The biggest pushback has actually been from the amount of time we'd have to spend fixing type-related bugs instead of developing new features.
I have the same problem. Any time I use a dynamically typed language, whatever time I save not specifying the type, I’ll lose immediately when I have to hunt down what sort of data this function expects or chase down some error that a compiler would have caught in a statically typed language.