GB: "Types are useful for:
1. Doc for human
2. Doc for machine
3. Making things faster
…
4. Correctness"
This was experience from the Strongtalk project, which implemented a fast, typed Smalltalk. Strongtalk was purchased by Sun and the tech. was the basis for Java's Hotspot. They actually expected the correctness factor to be much higher, but in practice the static type system only helped to find one or two minor bugs in largely unused code-paths in the libraries. I also find it interesting that "making things faster" is on the list, because the mantra from that part of the discipline has always been that static types do not help for performance, because the JIT will fix it all.
MF: “Research on Types and Soundness smothers research on programming languages”
Clarifying, says something along the lines that you have to figure out more powerful/better language mechanisms first, then later start thinking about how to type them properly.
Q: "Do you hate static types" GB: "No" MF: "No"
GB: "Types are useful for: 1. Doc for human 2. Doc for machine 3. Making things faster … 4. Correctness"
This was experience from the Strongtalk project, which implemented a fast, typed Smalltalk. Strongtalk was purchased by Sun and the tech. was the basis for Java's Hotspot. They actually expected the correctness factor to be much higher, but in practice the static type system only helped to find one or two minor bugs in largely unused code-paths in the libraries. I also find it interesting that "making things faster" is on the list, because the mantra from that part of the discipline has always been that static types do not help for performance, because the JIT will fix it all.
MF: “Research on Types and Soundness smothers research on programming languages”
Clarifying, says something along the lines that you have to figure out more powerful/better language mechanisms first, then later start thinking about how to type them properly.