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Type checking is a symptom, not a solution

(programmingsimplicity.substack.com)
67 points mpweiher | 1 comments | 05 Sep 25 05:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.205s | source
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stephenlf ◴[05 Sep 25 06:49 UTC] No.45135654[source]▶
Horrendous take. Humans can reason about (some) hardware chips because they are space-constrained. The analogous solution in software would be to limit the size of your programs to a human-readable size—18k loc or so.

The author seems to like black boxes. Unix corelib is a collection of black boxes[1]. So are docker containers[2]. Do you know what else are black boxes? TYPES. Specifically interfaces. Types let you compartmentalize your software into as many black boxes as you want, then compose them.

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[1] Try building any non trivial service by composing Unix corelib tools, docker containers, or REST APIs. You’re in for a world of hurt.

[2] Docker containers aren’t even really isolated. The JupyterHub DockerSpawner image spins up and tears down other docker containers at will. The whole thing is a mess of state. There’s no composition—just the container equivalent of `goto`

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1. saulpw ◴[05 Sep 25 20:50 UTC] No.45143433[source]▶
> a human-readable size—18k loc or so.

I agree in general with the principle that there is a 'human-readable' size, and that it's around some 10k-30k LOC, but I'm curious how you came up with that specific number. Has it been researched and measured? Does it vary significantly from person to person? I tend to think of 80kLOC as the upper limit, because that's the size of the DOOM engine, written by a single highly-capable programmer, who presumably had it all in his head at one point. But that is empirically way beyond what I'm capable of.