Programming Languages

1167 readers

5 users here now

Hello!

This is the current Lemmy equivalent of https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/.

The content and rules are the same here as they are over there. Taken directly from the /r/ProgrammingLanguages overview:

This community is dedicated to the theory, design and implementation of programming languages.

Be nice to each other. Flame wars and rants are not welcomed. Please also put some effort into your post.

This isn't the right place to ask questions such as "What language should I use for X", "what language should I learn", and "what's your favorite language". Such questions should be posted in /c/learn_programming or /c/programming.

This is the right place for posts like the following:

"Check out this new language I've been working on!"
"Here's a blog post on how I implemented static type checking into this compiler"
"I want to write a compiler, where do I start?"
"How does the Java compiler work? How does it handle forward declarations/imports/targeting multiple platforms/?"
"How should I test my compiler? How are other compilers and interpreters like gcc, Java, and python tested?"
"What are the pros/cons of ?"
"Compare and contrast vs. "
"Confused about the semantics of this language"
"Proceedings from PLDI / OOPSLA / ICFP / "

See /r/ProgrammingLanguages for specific examples

Related online communities

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Type inference was a mistake (borretti.me)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

46 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Does type inference provide a practical benefit to you beyond saving you some keystrokes?

it's more readable! like, that's literally the whole point. It's more readable and you don't have to care about a type unless you want or need to.

What tools do you use for code review? Do you do them in GitHub/gitlab/Bitbucket or are you pulling every code review directly into your IDE? How frequently do you do code reviews?

I use GitHub and Intellij. I do code reviews daily, I'm one of two staff software engineers on my team. I rarely ever need to know the type, and if I do Github is perfect for 90% of use cases, and for the other 10% I literally click the PR button in intellij and open up the pull request that way. It's dead simple.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago

So you're saying that for you, not only do you generally not see value is knowing types, but that them being explicitly defined is DETRIMENTAL to your ability to read the code?

For me, it's like if I whip open a recipe book and see tomato sauce, dough, cheese, and pepperoni are the ingredients. Before the recipe details specifically how they are combined, I have a pretty good context from which to set expectations based on that alone. It's a cheap way to build context.

But I don't think you're all lying. And you are very likely not all incompetent either. I wish I could sit down with you and have you show me examples of code where explicit types are detrimental to readability, so I could examine if there are cases that exist but are somehow being mitigated by a code style policy that I'm taking for granted.