Type checking is a symptom, not a solution

>The standard answer is scale. “Small programs don’t need types,” the reasoning goes, “but large programs become unmaintainable without them.” This sounds reasonable until you realize what we’re actually admitting: that we’ve designed our systems to be inherently incomprehensible to human reasoning. We’ve created architectures so tangled, so dependent on invisible connections and implicit behaviors, that we need automated tools just to verify that our programs won’t crash in obvious ways.

A few thoughts...

1. Some things are complicated. Of course we should elminate needless complexity - but not all complexity is needless.

2. If your system has huge thing 1 connected to huge thing 2, then you have to understand 2 huge things and a little glue. If you instead have a system comprised of small thing 1 connected to small thing 2, ... connected to small thing 100, you now how to understand 100 small things and 99 connections. The nature of these things and connections matter but you can't just keep dividing things to simplify them. John Carmack's email about inlining code springs to mind: http://number-none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.htm...

3. "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)

I would love to see the author take a complex system where Typescript (for example) is "necessary" and refactor it to JavaScript.