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Ahmed FASIH @22

Are there languages with static types that compile to the way and compile to or how to or ♯ to .NET CLR?

Stefan Klöckner @stefan

@22 What's the benefit? I generally use static typed languages for system programming, if performance matters. If performance is neglectable I use a programmer-friendly (dynamic typed) language. Why would I expose myself to the hassle of static typing, if the code finally gets translated to something closer to natural language?

Ahmed FASIH @22

@stefan I think many programmers use static types to manage complexity and aid abstraction, and not (mainly) for performance. Consider the TypeScript compiler which strips type information during codegen—types are only used up to compile-time, as programmer aids (maybe there's some optimizations that are enabled but I haven't seen any in my emitted code). Static typing my webapps and data analysis scripts makes refactoring and extending much easier than if dynamic. Does that explain my angle?

Wim 🅾 @wim_v12e

@22 @stefan I'm not sure about the last claim, at least in my own experience it is not harder or easier to refactor/extend Haskell than Perl. But of course it may very well be different for you.

Ahmed FASIH @22

@wim_v12e @stefan Maybe I'm over-imagining how often this happens but—I'll change the name or type of something in one corner of my code, and suddenly my editor shows me four other places that I need to now update. I love that love that Rust and Elm have for me. It was a stark contrast, having that experience while developing frontend in Elm, versus the much scarier experience of writing the backend in plain JS, where the editor/language dgaf about my problems 😓

Wim 🅾 @wim_v12e

@22 @stefan I see. I didn't think about editor support as it is not a property of the language, but of course in practice they belong together. What editor are you using that has these nice features for Rust and Elm?

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Ahmed FASIH @22

@wim_v12e @stefan Atom has absolutely superb support for Elm and Rust, and Haskell too! (I used the IHaskell Jupyter kernel with the Hydrogen Atom plugin.) See screenshots at

twitter.com/gratidue/status/81

Yes, I should be clear that in my mind "a language" is the whole experience—Elm and Rust are new and very focused on "DX" (developer experience), but Haskell also gave me great feedback about what was wrong with my code and how to make it better. I will do more Haskell/PureScript someday for sure.

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