alt Hacker NewsRust? 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.
Replies
I can't remember if I came up with this analogy or not, but programming in Rust is like trying to shape a piece of clay just as it's being baked.
> Explorative work becomes quite difficult if the type system is really rigid
Or to put it another way, the ease of programming is correlated with the ease of making undetected mistakes.
> You have a price to pay for "not being allowed to do mistakes": Explorative work becomes quite difficult
This is a huge deal for me.
At the beginning of most "what if...?" exercises, I am just trying to get raw tuples of information in and out of some top-level-program logic furnace for the first few [hundred] iterations. I'll likely resort to boxing and extremely long argument lists until what I was aiming for actually takes hold.
I no longer have an urge to define OOP type hierarchies when the underlying domain model is still a vague cloud in my head. When unguided, these abstractions feel like playing Minecraft or Factorio.