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mplanchard04/01/20255 repliesview on HN

This is a silly take. There were certainly plenty of large projects written in JS before Typescript existed or became popular, some maintained by small teams or single individuals. There are plenty of large projects written in Python pre-typing, in PHP, etc.

I personally choose to work with typed languages most of the time, and I’m thoroughly convinced of their value, but acting like it is literally impossible to write a large project without types is just inaccurate.


Replies

tossandthrow04/01/2025

No, you are right, it is possible.

But it would be significantly more expensive.

So I should probably preface and say that it is not possible within the budget I have (We are ~2 full time developing and maintaining everything on a 140k LOC platform spanning from infrastructure, backend, multiple frontends).

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avinassh04/01/2025

> There are plenty of large projects written in Python.

There are, but they are certainly a pain in the ass to work with.

I once had to work on a semi-large Python codebase and got so frustrated that I wanted to port the code to some other language. The best part? I wrote the majority of that codebase myself, just months earlier.

I ranted about it here: https://avi.im/blag/2023/refactoring-python/

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andai04/01/2025

The only way it's possible is if you keep them in your head.

david42204/01/2025

> There are plenty of large projects written in Python

I've worked on one of those, and I would not recommend it.

hu304/02/2025

> There are plenty of large projects written in Python pre-typing, in PHP, etc.

Just a nit. Modern PHP is typed and has been for years.