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Types are like the Weather, Type Systems are like Weathermen - Matthias Felleisen

38 videos recommended on HN
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1 HN user recommended this talk1 month2016–2021 score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Referenced in static versus dynamic typing debates, including his remark that Hindley-Milner doesn't really work.

Matthias Felleisen's keynote uses weather prediction as an analogy for type systems, arguing they forecast problems so you can act on them. It draws on his experience developing Typed Racket.

“Matthias Felleisen, one of the developers of Racket, recently gave a talk about the motivation behind typed Racket” (HN, 2016)

1 recommendations · 2 citations · Talks · advanced

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@jhck Jul 2016 Recommends
on HN thread Racket v6.6
Matthias Felleisen, one of the developers of Racket, recently gave a talk about the motivation behind typed Racket; it can be found here: [this video]
Felleisen on motivation behind Typed Racket.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@iLemming Oct 2017 Cites it
on HN thread Clojure/Conj 2017 – Opening Keynote by Rich Hickey [video]
One thing that was a personal shocker for me to hear, from not just anyone, but Matthias Felleisen himself - "My research group has investigated the topic for almost 3 decades, and we came to the conclusion that Hindley-Millner doesn't really work". I was really baffled. That was at ClojureWest 2016. Here's the talk itself [this video] . That talk is not about Clojure - Felleisen doesn't even use Clojure. That happened before Clojure.spec was announced. I couldn't really figure out what exactly he was talking about. Not until later, when I tried Spec.
Felleisen says Hindley-Milner doesn't really work.
@moocowtruck Feb 2021 Cites it
on HN thread Nx: Multi-dimensional tensors Elixir lib with multi-staged compilation (CPU/GPU)
how is static typing lacking evidence? don't we use that in rust to prevent the existence of large swaths of errors vs say C? i know for sure when turning on typescript for some javascript projects at work we found many issues, those all seem like wins? Why when I look at some dynamic languages say for example clojure i see stuff like type annotations in their core libraries, and then spec's to help provide a lot of what a type system can do? do you have maybe a counter argument to this fellow [this video]
Offered as counterargument to static typing claims.

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