Get the latest tech news

Type Safety Doesn't Matter


type safety is not important. It's only useful because of what it accomplishes: moving errors from runtime to compile time.

The reason is because, even if a change adds “type safety,” this extra complexity is only warranted if it achieves our primary goal, namely reducing runtime errors. And if you watched my talk the economic argument for functional programming(or read the slides), you may be familiar with this way of thinking as the opportunity cost of spending more time on type safety. I continue to believe that the vast majority of the value I’ve received from strongly typed languages like Rust, Haskell, and even TypeScript come from the “simplest” features like enums/ADTs and pattern matching.

Get the Android app

Or read this on Hacker News

Read more on:

Photo of Type Safety

Type Safety