Ben Brinckerhoff

I write Clojure(Script) & Ruby, climb rocks, explore cities, and try to meditate daily. Engineer at @wundercapital

[Ben Brinckerhoff @bbrinck]

I talked about all these ideas and about the limits of isolating complex, dependent effects in #clojure https://t.co/qEXuIoxS85

[Ben Brinckerhoff @bbrinck]

@vikasreddy Yeah, sorry, I explained this poorly. You're right that *using* the type is easy.

The hard part is designing complicated types (& then adjusting it as the program changes).

I'm no Typescript expert, but here's the tweet I was thinking of
https://t.co/hfw7QjLLNr

[SaltyAom @saltyAom]

The logic The type

[Ben Brinckerhoff @bbrinck]

@vikasreddy Again, very anecdotally, but I would guess that fewer than 5% of the bugs that make it to production in our app would have been caught by static typing. A 5% reduction would be nice! But I'm it depends on how much time we'd spend writing/maintaining types

[Ben Brinckerhoff @bbrinck]

@vikasreddy 3. At least the last time I looked, there still isn't evidence that static types reduce bugs or reduce getting code to production. Yes, programming studies are very hard to do, but given the supposed enormous benefit here, you'd think we'd be able to repeatedly detect the effects

[Ben Brinckerhoff @bbrinck]

@vikasreddy I'd also like type systems that behave more like linters, which do a bunch of work and bring my attention to likely mistakes, but I can choose to ignore (depending on the code or my context)

[Ben Brinckerhoff @bbrinck]

@vikasreddy My general feeling is that static types are not bad, just over applied.

I'd like to be able to dynamically type my entire program when I'm figuring out what I want to do, then add types to riskiest parts of program (or parts that would benefit from perf boost).

[Ben Brinckerhoff @bbrinck]

@vikasreddy In those domains, getting the logic right (i.e. solving the core business problem) was of higher value than getting the types to line up throughout the course of many experiments.

[Ben Brinckerhoff @bbrinck]

@vikasreddy There are many domains where I'd rather be able to try hundreds of experiments throughout the day instead of spending time getting the entire program to compile (both programmer time and compiler time).

[Ben Brinckerhoff @bbrinck]

@vikasreddy Anecdotally, I saw experts in Elm spend enormous amounts of time adjusting and perfecting types as the requirements for the business changed. The statically typed code was safer, but at a very high cost in terms of time.

[Ben Brinckerhoff @bbrinck]

@vikasreddy 1. Static types are more work than they are worth: there are cases where the type is complicated but the logic is relatively simple. I saw an example in Typescript a few days ago on Twitter, of course I can't find it now.

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

a big deal: @elonmusk, Y. Bengio, S. Russell, ⁦⁦@tegmark⁩, V. Kraknova, P. Maes, ⁦@Grady_Booch, ⁦@AndrewYang⁩, ⁦@tristanharris⁩ & over 1,000 others, including me, have called for a temporary pause on training systems exceeding GPT-4 https://t.co/PJ5YFu0xm9

[Ben Brinckerhoff @bbrinck]

All of this is based on the following sources. Any misinterpretation or mistakes are entirely my fault! I'm certainly not a Zig expert by any means.

- https://t.co/AYAVlHNk4d
- https://t.co/rOlq6wZt4i

[Ben Brinckerhoff @bbrinck]

#clojure is my favorite language, but I've been toying around with #ziglang in my spare time. The language is of course very different from #clojure in features and purpose, but there are some interesting parallels (and coincidences).

[Ben Brinckerhoff @bbrinck]

If you like either #ziglang or #clojure, I'd recommend trying out the other language. They are very different in many ways, but I suspect you'll find much to learn and appreciate. I certainly did!