Static-typing is a powerful metadata database, exploit it!


Static-typing is a powerful metadata database, exploit it!

Today someone decided to pretend they knew something about how a modern statically typed language developer works. Perhaps they are big emacs fans or something because they felt that static-types leading to autocomplete in an IDE was somehow a feature in the language FOR THE IDE. The IDE gets no benefit, in fact, editors like emacs and TextMate are much simpler. But I can tell you that the developer gets a tremendous benefit by having this metadata database not only present in the code and easily queryable but heavily exploited by her tools. What is amazing about this metadata database is that it is actually populated by that same IDE. There are very few times that I even type a Type — 90% of those times are when declaring a new Type — the rest of the time the IDE is very patiently maintaining and leveraging that database for me. Even better, when someone else is looking at the source code, or even using the library, they instantly get 80% of the documentation. All that is left are the semantics of the calls. Perhaps we need to have some sort of meetup where we look over each others shoulders and actually understand how someone who is on the other side really works rather than dynamic-typing language people assuming that the programmer is maintaining the huge metadata database present in the static-typing language developers code. And on the otherside that static-typers are assuming that the dynamic-typing language developer is memorizing all kinds of arcane method call names, argument shapes and the shapes of all the libraries they are using. Do you really memorize all that trivia?