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Skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in "faster" languages

(nolanlawson.com)
160 points todsacerdoti | 7 comments | 20 Oct 24 21:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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steve_adams_86 ◴[21 Oct 24 08:23 UTC] No.41901887[source]▶
I’ve written quite a bit of tooling in JS, and I genuinely enjoy the language, but I feel like Rust and Go are a godsend for these types of tools. I will sometimes prototype with TypeScript, but if something requires massive concurrency and parallelism, it’s unlikely I’ll stick with it.

I wonder if the author would feel differently if they spent more time writing in more languages on tooling like this. My life got a lot easier when I stopped trying to write TypeScript everywhere and leveraged other languages for their strengths where it made sense. I really wanted to stick to one language I felt most capable with, but seeing how much easier it could be made me change my mind in an instant.

The desire for stronger duck typing is confusing to me, but to each their own. I find Rust allows me to feel far, far more confident in tooling specifically because of its type system. I love that about it. I wish Go’s was a bit more sane, but there are tons of people who disagree with me.

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1. bluGill ◴[21 Oct 24 14:05 UTC] No.41904308[source]▶
> The desire for stronger duck typing is confusing to me, but to each their own

I really like duck typing when I'm working on small programs - under 10,000 lines of code. Don't make me worry about stupid details like that, you know what I mean so just do the $%^#@ thing I want and get out of my way.

When I work with large programs (more than 50k lines of code - I work with some programs with more than 10 million lines and I know of several other projects that are much larger - and there is reason to believe many other large programs exist where those who work on them are not allowed to talk about them) I'm glad for the discipline that strong typing forces on me. You quickly reach a point in code where types save you from far more problems than their annoyance costs.

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2. Joker_vD ◴[21 Oct 24 14:16 UTC] No.41904433[source]▶
> you know what I mean just do the $%^#@ thing I want

Yeah, it's just that about 10k LoC, as I've also noticed, you don't actually know what you yourself mean! It's probably because such amount of code is almost never written in one sitting, so you end up forgetting that e.g. you've switched, for this particular fields, from a stack of strings to just a single string (you manage the stacking elsewhere) and now your foo[-1] gives you hilarious results.

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3. romwell ◴[21 Oct 24 15:11 UTC] No.41905055[source]▶
Types in the end are contacts you make with yourself, enforced by the compiler.

A weak type system gives you the freedom to trick yourself.

I don't feel it's a feature.

4. nobodyandproud ◴[21 Oct 24 17:29 UTC] No.41906308[source]▶
A language that goes from prototype-quality (duck typing, dynamic, and interpreted) to strict static compile checks would be nice.

I can’t think of any in the mainstream, however.

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5. Spivak ◴[21 Oct 24 18:34 UTC] No.41907006[source]▶
Isn't that TypeScript or more generically "type hints" in other languages? If all you care about is that your program is valid for some gradually increasing subset of your code at compile time then these work great.
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6. bluGill ◴[21 Oct 24 19:20 UTC] No.41907445{3}[source]▶
i don't do javascript, but I know from experience adding const to c++ is impossible I expect the similar for types
7. nobodyandproud ◴[22 Oct 24 12:12 UTC] No.41913477{3}[source]▶
I was envisioning a system or some other compiled language, but you’re right. I overlooked Typescript and it indeed comes close.