WHY TYPES AREN’T VERY IMPORTANT , a talk by Michael Feathers
This was a talk at the FP User group. Michael proposed that types are about ergonomics. He proposed that they are not inherently good or bad, but that it depends on the problem and the personal choice, with much more detail that this. It is also quite relevant to keep in mind that Michael has a lot of milage on legacy code bases.
I find that a sane aproach when thinking about types is to think of them in terms of some sort of set of things. Going beyond that makes things difficult to reason about because either
- they tend to be things that disagree or slightly overlap with each other
- if you think of them in a more specific way and then talk to people that are thinking about them in also a very different but speciifc way, it leads to long winded debates that wind up nowhere (sometimes)
In fact there is a really good post about things that you should know before starting to debate static vs dynamic typing (and it’s a pretty long article :D)
It is not a great idea to talk about types without rebelling agasint it’s definition.
I think I will leave this here,
until the next time