alt Hacker News> It was a significant improvement that now many a silly mistake did result in an error message instead of in an erroneous answer. (And even this improvement wasn't universally appreciated: some people found error messages they couldn't ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate "the ease of programming" with the ease of making undetected mistakes.)
If I didn't know who wrote this it would seem like a jab directly at people who dislike Rust.
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I would have thought of people who unironically liked fractal-of-bad-design-era PHP and wat-talk JavaScript.
I guess some kinds of foolishness are just timeless.
As a person who dislikes rust, the problem is the error messages when there's no error -- quite a different problem. The rust type system is not an accurate model of RAM, the CPU and indeed, no device.
He's here talking about interpreted languages.
He's also one of those mathematicians who are now called computer scientists whose 'algorithms' are simple restatements of mathematics and require no devices. A person actively hostile, in temperament, to the embarrassing activity of programming an actual computer.
Rust? Since when is Rust the pinnacle of static type safety?
After I've worked for some time with a language that can express even stronger invariants in types than Rust (Scala) I don't see that property anymore as clear win regardless circumstances. I don't think any more "stronger types == better, no matter what".
You have a price to pay for "not being allowed to do mistakes": Explorative work becomes quite difficult if the type system is really rigid. Fast iteration may become impossible. (Small changes may require to re-architecture half your program, just to make the type system happy again![1])
It's a trade-off. Like with everything else. For a robust end product it's a good thing. For fast experimentation it's a hindrance.
[1] Someone described that issue quite well in the context of Rust and game development here: https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev/
But it's not exclusive to Rust, nor game dev.