Yeah, TypeScript has to integrate with JavaScript for practicality’s sake, which pierces a hole in its ability to do proper, rigorous type checking. It’s closer to machine-readable documentation that helpfully flags some errors than an actual type-checked language, which will make you get your types right instead of gently suggesting that there might be an issue the way TypeScript does.

For the rest, well, there isn’t even actually a question, I suspect you’d open a door and pick a box and hope that you’ve got a gold ball to pick, and it’s not clear that he’s following Monty Hall rules and always opening a bad door, but I think knowing which ball got thrown would make the rest of the odds fall into place.

More specifically, they’re borrowing the more mathematical meaning of variables, where if you say x equals 5, you can’t later say x is 6, and where a statement like “x = x + 1” is nonsense. Using “let” means you’re setting the value once and that’s what it’s going to remain as long as it exists, while “var” variables can be changed later. Functional languages, which are usually made by very math-y people, will often protest the way programmers use operators by saying that = is strictly for equality and variable assignment is := instead of == and = in most C-style languages.

Do you think there’s any reason to believe that these tools are going to continue their breakneck progress? It seems like we’ve reached a point where throwing more GPUs and text at these things is not yielding more results, and they still don’t have the problem solving skills to work out tasks outside of their training set. It’s closer to a StackOverflow that magically has the answers to most questions you ask than a replacement for proper software engineering. I know you never know if a breakthrough is around the corner, but it feels like we’ve hit a plateau for the foreseeable future.

Love a language that doesn’t care if you’re using inputs to get outputs or using outputs to get inputs

Yeah, they’re probably talking about nulls. In Java, object references (simplified pointers, really) can be null, pointing nowhere and throwing an exception if you try to access them, which is fine when you don’t have a value for that reference (for example, you asked for a thing that doesn’t exist, or you haven’t made the thing yet), but it means that every time you interact with an object, if it turns out to have been null, a null pointer exception is getting thrown and likely crashing your program. You can check first if you think a value might be null, but if you miss one, it explodes.

Kotlin has nulls too, but the type system helps track where they could be. If a variable can be null, it’ll have a type like String?, and if not, the type is String. With that distinction, a function can explicitly say “I need a non-null value here” and if your value could be null, the type system will make you check first before you can use it.

Kotlin also has some nice quality of life improvements over Java; it’s less verbose (not a hard task), doesn’t force everything to belong to a class, supports data classes which are automatically immutable and behave more like primitive values than objects, and other improvements.

I see this as an accessibility problem, computers have incredible power but taking advantage of it requires a very specific way of thinking and the drive to push through adversity (the computer constantly and correctly telling you “you’re doing it wrong”) that a lot of people can’t or don’t want to do. I don’t think they’re wrong or lazy to feel that way, and it’s a barrier to entry just like a set of stairs is to a wheelchair user.

The question is what to do about it, and there’s so much we as an industry should be doing before we even start to think about getting “normies” writing code or automating their phones. Using a computer sucks ass in so many ways for regular people, you buy something cheap and it’s slow as hell, it’s crapped up with adware and spyware out of the box, scammers are everywhere ready to cheat you out of your money… anyone here is likely immune to all that or knows how to navigate it but most people are just muddling by.

If we got past all that, I think it’d be a question of meeting users where they are. I have a car but I couldn’t replace the brakes, nor do I want to learn or try to learn, but that’s okay. My car is as accessible as I want it to be, and the parts that aren’t accessible, I go another route (bring it to a mechanic who can do the things I can’t). We can do this with computers too, make things easy for regular people but don’t try to make them all master programmers or tell them they aren’t “really” using it unless they’re coding. Bring the barrier down as low is it can go but don’t expect everyone to be trying to jump over it all the time, because they likely care about other things more.

I’m so confused that the same people can say “why does everyone get their undies in a bunch that we happily accept putting arbitrary data in columns regardless of type, that’s good, it’s flexible, but fine, we’ll put in a ‘strict’ keyword if you really want column types to mean something” and also “every other SQL says 1==‘1’ but this is madness, strings aren’t integers, what is everyone else thinking?!”