alt Hacker NewsI think it's a cultural thing. People like to think of a language for the build system as a little language that somehow doesn't "deserve" a type system. And even they do think a type system is necessary, they think such a language doesn't "deserve" a complicated type system (say Java-like with subtyping and generics) which makes that type system less useful.
I'm curious, what kind of type system does BUSY use?
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I wonder why people love to create languages to be embed in applications when there are plenty of languages that are already useful and well known.
So in the end, you have to fight the half-assed small language that was created and have to find a way to connect to some real language to get things done.
I don't think it's purely cultural. Starlark is interpreted, which presents some challenges to type checking. You either need to make the interpreter more complex, or have an out-of-band type checking step.
It's a rather traditional type system; the specification is here: http://software.rochus-keller.ch/busy_spec.html. The main advantage are the combination of modularization, types and formal declarations, so that if you make a change in a large build (such as my https://github.com/rochus-keller/LeanQt or https://github.com/rochus-keller/LeanCreator systems) incompatibilites are immediately found by the compiler. Without these features you can never be sure whether all effects were checked.