Recent submissions

Comment · 5 years ago
I disagree, I don't want my project to successfully build at all if I have type errors.
Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 7 years ago
> The real downside to beetus is having to think about it constantly, IMO

Pretty much this. Obviously needles and finger pricks are a bigger deal for some people, but most diabetics get used to it fairly quickly. The hard part is the constant mental drain of having to be your own pancreas. It's like you're constantly flying a plane where you have to manually maintain a certain altitude, because you'll crash and die if you fly too low or too high. It's exhausting.

Comment · 7 years ago
Thanks for details. Here's my response to most of them (some of this is definitely anecdotal of course).

> - Slow debug cycle due to increased compile time. If using TDD, it takes longer to run tests. The delays adds up.

I've not personally encountered any significant compiling overhead in comparison to a regular Babel ES6 transpile. Obviously depends on project size, but there are a lot of tweaks that you can do to speed it up. I've had good luck with ts-loader.

> - Sporadic source mapping issues/bugs which makes it hard to fix things (I had an issue with Mocha tests last week where it was always telling me that the issue was on line 1). I've worked with TypeScript on multiple projects across different companies but every single time, there has been source mapping or configuration issues of some kind.

Are you advocating ES6 instead of TypeScript? It seems like all modern JS hits a transpilation stage before it hits the browser these days, and I see the same source mapping issues whenever I use ES6/7 with Babel + Webpack.

> - Type definitions from DefinitelyTyped are often out of date or have missing properties/methods. It means that I can't use the latest version of a library.

Fair point, although I haven't run into this much myself.

> - Third party libraries are difficult to integrate into my project's code due to conflicts in type names or structural philosophy (e.g. they leverage types to impose constraints which are inconsistent with my project requirements).

Not sure I follow, do you have an example?

> - Doesn't guarantee type safety at runtime; e.g. If parsing an object from JSON at runtime; you still need to do type validation explicitly. The 'unknown' type helps but it's not clear that this whole flow of validating unknown data and then casting to a known type adds any value over regular schema validation done in plain JavaScript.

I mostly agree with this, which is why my strategy is just to do regular JS style schema validation where necessary, and then cast the object, rather than relying on `unknown`.

> - Compiler warnings make it hard to test code quickly using console.log(...); I'm more reliant on clunky debuggers which slows me down a lot and breaks my train of thought.

Not sure I fully follow. If your code compiles to the point where you can use the debugger, you should have been able to use a console.log as well, right?

> - Whenever I write any class/method, I have to spend a considerable amount of time and energy thinking about how to impose constraints on the user of the library/module instead of assuming that the user is an intelligent person who knows what they're doing.

If you're writing code used by others, you need to be clear about what your API expects and allows anyway, so why not be explicit about it, in a way that the compiler can enforce? An intelligent person makes mistakes, so why not see if you can give the computer the ability to catch some of those for you? And TypeScript still gives an intelligent user the ability to supersede your type restrictions if they absolutely need to.

> - It takes a lot of time think of good names for interfaces and they are renamed often as project requirements evolve. It's not always clear whether similar concepts should be different types or merged into one. It often comes down to what constraints you want to impose on users; This adds a whole layer of unnecessary mental work which could have been better spent on thinking about logic only.

I don't think coming up with good interface names is more difficult than good class or method names. And I'd argue that thinking about the constraints you want to impose on users is important for developing maintainable code -- whether you're doing type checking or not. And ultimately those constraints still have to exist in some manner, but without type checking the "constraint" will be the code breaking in some undefined way. By doing so you save yourself and others the mental overhead of trying to figure out what types you're dealing with at any point in your code base, or what types you're expected to pass into any given function. The initial overhead of thinking about your types pays off quickly.

> - Setting up TypeScript is a pain.

Anecdotal, but I've never had much of a problem with it (for React users, I believe you can get it for free in create-react-app now). And it's a one time setup cost anyway.

Comment · 7 years ago
> It's not worth it. Productivity will drop enormously

How does TypeScript make your "productivity drop enormously"? It has type inference, union types, looks just like ES6, and the typing is fully optional. The learning curve is quick if you've ever done static typing before (and not that hard even if you haven't).

And you get the productivity boost of not dealing with a lot of the regular JavaScript BS (no more "spooky undefined at a distance" because somebody forgot a 3rd parameter 4 methods down the callstack), as well as the ability to safely and automatically refactor, and the ability to immediately understand the API of other people's code or libraries (as long as it's typed, and most popular libraries have type definitions now).

In my experience the productivity benefits more than make up for the time you spend managing your types.

Comment · 8 years ago
Have you used TypeScript 3.0? They improved the type errors a lot. I'd highly recommend giving it another shot.
Comment · 8 years ago
One interesting thing about Dark Souls is that there is quite a bit of ambiguity around what the "age of dark" actually implies, and there's a lot of hints that it might actually be a beneficial state for humanity.

Personally I found Bloodborne to be even more hopeless. It's all based on a Lovecraftian view of the universe, where we're completely insignificant next to these higher order beings and concepts. There are also almost no happy endings for any of the NPCs, which contrasts with Dark Souls a bit. But again, that's a really good translation of Lovecraft into video game form!

Comment · 8 years ago
Yes, but you still need insulin on keto. In fact, starting keto can be dangerous for a T1D at first until you find out what your new, lower, requirements are. You put yourself at risk of hypoglycemia, so you have to be extra careful with dosing while you're figuring it out. Because of that, a closed loop artificial pancreas could be incredibly helpful for a T1D going on keto as well.
Comment · 8 years ago
The article WAS focused on type 1, though, where there is no cure, from diet or otherwise. It's absolutely revolutionary for those of us with type 1.
Comment · 8 years ago
> The era of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge is upon us.

I still have no idea what "intelligent edge" is supposed to mean.

Comment · 8 years ago
For me it would have the same things that make Typescript appealing:

- Full access to a large and mature ecosystem (one that Crystal doesn't quite have)

- The ability to gradually add typing to an existing Ruby codebase. No need to rewrite an entire application. Just gradually add types to new code and during refactors.

If I was starting a new project I would definitely be considering Crystal, but I still feel like something like this would be great. Typescript has been a godsend for my frontend development life, and I would love to have something like this for my backend Ruby development.

Comment · 8 years ago
> i fail to see the benefit of a language like Crystal.

For me it's a Ruby like language with static typing. For my typical use cases I don't really need the extra performance, but those two things are enough to make me interested.

Comment · 8 years ago
I've been a fan of Ruby for about 5 years, but lately I've been leaning a lot more heavily towards statically typed languages. Which is why Crystal is at the top of my "want to learn" list. Ruby inspired syntax and statically typed? Yes please. The speed is just a bonus for me.
Comment · 8 years ago
5% for conservative and 7% for aggressive would have been better choices...I know the goal was to make this calculator simple, but those values should have be configurable with saner defaults.
Comment · 8 years ago
Busy busy busy

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