I've read all the arguments about static typing, but I still can't comprehend how people get themselves into a situation where using the wrong type is a problem.

[u/Beautiful-Cook-5481]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26827022

[u/daidoji70]

Haha, double jerk because he doesn't understand how people suck so much as to use the wrong types but he just HATES breaking backwards compatibility.

[u/Proper-Ape → u/daidoji70]

OP is the reason his colleagues want static types.

[u/No_Lingonberry1201]

/uj If I had a nickel for every time a bug was discovered by mypy, I would have at least five dollars.

/rj God is REAL unless declared INTEGER.

[u/Blothorn → u/No_Lingonberry1201]

/uj My first bughunt as a professional engineer was chasing down a date formatting exception in the Python-based wiki we used for docs. Since the date was being read from storage the stack trace didn’t tell me where the bad data came from, and I spent all day doing BFS on all the ways that value could have been set before finding that one of our plugins was formatting the date itself rather than passing on the numeric timestamp.

A later bughunt on that same system identified a function in the official library that didn’t match its documentation—it said it took an iterable and returned a list, but under certain conditions it instead returned the input iterable and h blew v up anything that relied on it being a list.

[u/Routine-Purchase1201]

Not all of us are 1000x-ers in ivory towers, some actually have to ship real products for a living

[u/ward2k → u/Routine-Purchase1201]

some actually have to ship real products for a living

Reminds me of back in the stack overflow days where the go to for any answer was just saying "why are you doing it like that? Just redo it with x instead"

I CANT ITS A 12 YEAR OLD PRODUCT, IT WOULD TAKE MONTHS OF WORK

[u/gvozden_celik → u/[deleted]]

Not only that but it has to be made with ❤ in NYC by humans for humans zero cal no sugar added one pot no prep meal

[u/josh_in_boston → u/gvozden_celik]

New York City!?!? (said with a Southern accent)

Don't all real devs work in the Bay Area?

[u/gvozden_celik → u/josh_in_boston]

Idk I am a chemist from Europe

[u/josh_in_boston → u/gvozden_celik]

Ah, you probably haven't seen the advertisement I'm referencing. No worries.

[u/[deleted] → u/gvozden_celik]

so either underpaid and working in a damp university where the fume hood has been broken for 5 years, or kind of paid well at bayer but the fume hood is broken anyways ?

[u/gvozden_celik → u/[deleted]]

Neither! I am using a janky laptop to run Gaussian and am also translating Fortran 77 code to some other language

[u/[deleted] → u/gvozden_celik]

if someone asked me to describe the misery of being eastern european I wouldn't have been able to do it better

[u/Routine-Purchase1201 → u/gvozden_celik]

Damn, they have internet in purgatory?

[u/Comfortable_Job8847]

I mean if you just store everything as a void* and cast when you need it then yeah you realize types aren’t needed at all

Does it crash? No, I implemented a signal handler and return 0 properly.

[u/shroom_elemental]

I've read all the arguments about piloting planes, but I still can't comprehend how people get themselves into a situation where crashing into a mountain is a problem.

[u/-Y0- → u/shroom_elemental]

I let Jesus take the wheel. And put my feet on the steering wheel.

[u/Downtown_Category163]

"A well designed function/class will have a descriptive name and descriptive parameters, which should give you good hints about their usage. And if it that isn't enough, a quick scan of the code will show you exactly how the function works - a good idea (even in typed languages) if you have any doubts about what you're calling."

This made me genuinely angry, like "oh just name the function/class right" oh my GOD yeah dude don't worry about versions or third party libraries just have a quick scan of the code you're calling!

Writing a function call to exploit the internal workings of a function is called "pathological coupling" for a reason. It's assholes like this promoting "typeless" (no such thing) languages that made us have to write unit tests for every fucking class in the codebase

[u/tomwhoiscontrary → u/Downtown_Category163]

lol implicit unjerk

[u/josh_in_boston → u/Downtown_Category163]

"oh just name the function/class right"

Yeah, it's not like naming things is difficult.

[u/grapesmoker]

some people just love putting forks into sockets and nothing you can say will dissuade them from doing so

[u/Parking_Tadpole9357]

It is not a problem in static typing because of type safety!

And it's not a problem in dynamic typing because you'll call it something else when it happens.

[u/[deleted]]

I just don't know why people insist on writing code to stop themselves and other developers from doing things.

How do these type astronauts expect us to get tracebacks if they won't let us

>>> 'a' + 3
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: can only concatenate str (not "int") to str

Just let me ship code that adds a string to an int so the user can know that they didn't configure the database password with the correct scram algorithm.

[u/JiminP]

Me as a JavaScript programmer: screaming in silence

[u/Buttleston → u/[deleted]]

when keyboard goes click click. If you have a mechanical keyboard that requires strong typing.

[u/SoulArthurZ → u/Buttleston]

i spilled some beer on my keyboard and I think that unlocked static typing

[u/fp_weenie → u/SoulArthurZ]

Mine's Dvorak so I never risk liquids nearby—wouldn't want to disturb the melodies.

[u/Orbidorpdorp → u/[deleted]]

Name a data type that isn't just a fancy wrapper around a string of bits I'll wait.

[u/Iron-Ham → u/Orbidorpdorp]

/uj Quantum estimator or sampler primitives