upvote
TBF is the Python ecosystem any different? None and dict everywhere, requirements.txt without pinned versions... I'm not complaining either, as I wouldn't expect a unified typed experience in ecosystems where multiple competing type checkers and package managers have been introduced gradually. How could any library from the python3.4 era foresee dataclasses or the typing module?

Such changes take time, and I favor an "evolution trumps revolution"-approach for such features. The JS/TS ecosystem has the advantage here, as it has already been going through its roughest time since es2015. In hindsight, it was a very healthy choice and the type system with TS is something to be left desired in many programming languages.

If it weren't for its rich standard library and uv, I would still clearly favor TS and a runtime like bun or deno. Python still suffers from spread out global state and some multi-paradigm approach when it comes to concurrency (if concurrency has even been considered by the library author). Python being the first programming language for many scientists shows its toll too: rich libraries of dubious quality in various domains. Whereas JS' origins in browser scripting contributed to the convention to treat global state as something to be frowned upon.

I wish both systems would have good object schema validation build into the standard library. Python has the upper hand here with dataclasses, but it still follows some "take it or throw"-approach, rather than to support customization for validations.

reply
It was better because it had no silent errors, like 1+”1”. Far from perfect, the fact it raised exceptions and enforced the philosophy of “don’t ask for permission but forgiveness” makes the difference.

IMHO It’s irrelevant it has a slightly better typesystem and runtime but that’s totally irrelevant nowadays.

With AI doing mostly everything we should forget these past riddles. Now we all should be looking towards fail-safe systems, formal verification and domain modeling.

reply
Conflating types in binary operations hasn't been an issue for me since I started using TS in 2016. Even before that, it was just the result of domain modeling done badly, and I think software engineers got burned enough for using dynamic type systems at scale... but that's a discussion to be had 10 years ago. We all moved on from that, or at least I hope we did.

> Now we all should be looking towards fail-safe systems, formal verification and domain modeling.

We were looking forward to these things since the term distributed computing has been coined, haven't we? Building fail-safe systems has always been the goal since long-running processes were a thing.

Despite any "past riddles", the more expressive the type system the better the domain modeling experience, and I'd guess formal methods would benefit immensely from a good type system. Is there any formal language that is usable as general-purpose programming language I don't know of? I only ever see formal methods used for the verification of distributed algorithms or permission logic, on the theorem proving side of things, but I have yet to see a single application written only in something like Lean[0] or LiquidHaskell[1]...

[0]: https://lean-lang.org/

[1]: https://ucsd-progsys.github.io/liquidhaskell/

reply