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Skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in "faster" languages

(nolanlawson.com)
160 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 20 Oct 24 21:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.232s | source
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Jean-Papoulos ◴[21 Oct 24 06:37 UTC] No.41901260[source]▶
This guy is not competent to talk about what he's talking about.

>"JavaScript is, in my opinion, a working-class language. It’s very forgiving of types (this is one reason I’m not a huge TypeScript fan)."

Being "forgiving of types" is not a good thing. There's a reason most "type-less" languages have added type hints and the like (Python, Typescript, etc) and it's because the job of a programming language is to make it easier for me to tell the CPU what to do. Not having types is detrimental to that.

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1. wesselbindt ◴[21 Oct 24 09:08 UTC] No.41902107[source]▶
It's not forgiving of types at all. Reality is not forgiving of type errors. The only thing JavaScript does is move the moment where you find out reality is not forgiving of type errors to when your code is running in prod rather than at compile time, and makes them more implicit. That doesn't make it a bad thing per se to be forgiving of type errors. For example, if you really like fixing errors in production rather than before pushing them to production, this faux forgiveness is precisely what you should be looking for. It's all up to personal preference. Personally, I prefer knowing early on if there's problems with my code, and having a higher degree of certainty regarding it working or not.

All of this is under the assumption that whatever you're writing has some degree of complexity to it (an assumption which is satisfied very quickly). Five line python glue scripts don't necessarily benefit from static typing.