I’m playing with typeful language stuff. Having only done a pinch of Haskell, Scala, and Go tinkering amidst Ruby work over the past ten years, it’s jarring. But, things are much better than they were before I started with Ruby.
Elm in particular is like working with a teammate who is helpful but far more detail oriented than myself. It lets me know when I missed something. It points out cases I overlooked. It’s good software.
I’ve done less with Flow, but I like the idea of incrementally adding types to JavaScript. The type system is pragmatic and makes it easy to introduce types to a program as time and gumption permit. Having a repository of type definitions for popular libraries is a great boon too.
I’m also tinkering with Elixir, which is not really a typed thing. Erlang’s dialyzer is similar in concept to Flow, but different in implementation. Both allow gradually introducing types to systems.
I’m more interested in types stuff for frontends than backends. I want some assurance, in the wild world of browsers and devices, that my systems are soundly structured. Types buy me that. Backends, I feel, benefit from a little more leeway, and are often faster to deploy quick fixes to, such that I can get away without the full rigor of types.
Either way, I’m jazzed about today’s tools that help me think better as I build software.
