For programming I’ve found that the more strongly typed a language is, the less I have to worry about keeping in mind. Being able to offload a lot of basic soundness checks to the computer saves me when I lose track and allows me to focus on smaller components without having to worry about messing something else up elsewhere.
That’s about it, though, in terms of life pro tips from me. I end up having to rely on others to complete some trains of thought as I seem to get stuck at an early stage of thinking something through. That means I often start a conversation with an impression or opinion that I’ll have revised by the end of it due to factors I hadn’t considered.
I sympathise with the syntax often getting in the way. On the flip side I find untyped languages opaque, leaving me to guess what code actually does. Lisps are a great offender because macros, syntactic primitives and functions look the same but behave differently, and without type signatures it becomes a mess.
The thing with type systems is that they only reveal the gestalt of something that’s already there. All languages have types. It’s just that many don’t bother to correct you.
I tried to write a language parser in Guile, but when I couldn’t figure out what the different data structures actually looked like I eventually gave up.
I suffer from it too.
For programming I’ve found that the more strongly typed a language is, the less I have to worry about keeping in mind. Being able to offload a lot of basic soundness checks to the computer saves me when I lose track and allows me to focus on smaller components without having to worry about messing something else up elsewhere.
That’s about it, though, in terms of life pro tips from me. I end up having to rely on others to complete some trains of thought as I seem to get stuck at an early stage of thinking something through. That means I often start a conversation with an impression or opinion that I’ll have revised by the end of it due to factors I hadn’t considered.
deleted by creator
I sympathise with the syntax often getting in the way. On the flip side I find untyped languages opaque, leaving me to guess what code actually does. Lisps are a great offender because macros, syntactic primitives and functions look the same but behave differently, and without type signatures it becomes a mess.
The thing with type systems is that they only reveal the gestalt of something that’s already there. All languages have types. It’s just that many don’t bother to correct you.
I tried to write a language parser in Guile, but when I couldn’t figure out what the different data structures actually looked like I eventually gave up.
deleted by creator