Comment by mplanchard

Comment by mplanchard 11 days ago

This is a silly take. There were certainly plenty of large projects written in JS before Typescript existed or became popular, some maintained by small teams or single individuals. There are plenty of large projects written in Python pre-typing, in PHP, etc.

I personally choose to work with typed languages most of the time, and I’m thoroughly convinced of their value, but acting like it is literally impossible to write a large project without types is just inaccurate.

tossandthrow 11 days ago

No, you are right, it is possible.

But it would be significantly more expensive.

So I should probably preface and say that it is not possible within the budget I have (We are ~2 full time developing and maintaining everything on a 140k LOC platform spanning from infrastructure, backend, multiple frontends).

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tshaddox 11 days ago

Yeah, it just means those teams had to do a lot of work themselves which type systems do automatically. Given that the entire point of computing is automating things which a human could have done by hand, it makes more sense to talk about cost rather than capability.

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Nijikokun 11 days ago

That feels more like you're being abused rather than a framework problem.

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- tossandthrow 11 days ago
  
  We are not really over worked. Nobody puts in more than 30 hours, and we deliver the features the business need.
  However, we do have types and don't do type coercion. Types are sound full stack db -> backend -> frontends. We don't do any funky things. We don't use SSR (as the business does not require it). We test well, but not too much. We keep a sane architecture.
  We can also skip out on a lot of project shenanigans and mostly focus on our work.
  We don't (yet) use AI as a part of our workflows, and frankly, I don't see we can keep this way of working with the current gen AI.
  
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avinassh 11 days ago

> There are plenty of large projects written in Python.

There are, but they are certainly a pain in the ass to work with.

I once had to work on a semi-large Python codebase and got so frustrated that I wanted to port the code to some other language. The best part? I wrote the majority of that codebase myself, just months earlier.

I ranted about it here: https://avi.im/blag/2023/refactoring-python/

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mplanchard 11 days ago

Yeah I mean, I've worked on a multi-million-line Python 2 codebase. It wasn't easy, but it certainly wasn't impossible.

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ddejohn 11 days ago

Not sure why you're being downvoted -- large, legacy, untyped Python projects are a nightmare to work with.

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- joquarky 10 days ago
  
  Just keep in mind there are a thousand people right behind you who would be ecstatic to be able to work on this "nightmare" in order to earn a paycheck.
  
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andai 11 days ago

The only way it's possible is if you keep them in your head.

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david422 11 days ago

> There are plenty of large projects written in Python

I've worked on one of those, and I would not recommend it.

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hu3 10 days ago

> There are plenty of large projects written in Python pre-typing, in PHP, etc.

Just a nit. Modern PHP is typed and has been for years.

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