I’ve spent way too much time in arguments about types. Not the productive kind where you walk away with a new insight, but the frustrating ones where two developers talk past each other because they’re using the same words for completely different ideas. One person insists they need “type safety,” but what they really want …
What We Actually Mean When We Talk About Types Every developer has been stuck in a room where the word “type safety” gets thrown around like a grenade. One person is talking about runtime crashes. Another is fixated on compile-time checks. A third just wants to know why shipping a simple feature takes three days. …
I’ve spent a lot of time in codebases where the word “type-safe” gets thrown around like a badge of honor. Teams will proudly announce they’ve migrated to TypeScript, or that they’re using strict validation schemas, or that their new library is “fully typed.” But when you actually dig into the code, you find something else: …
I’ve spent way too many hours arguing about types. Not the fun kind—where you geek out over a clever union type or a particularly elegant generic constraint. I’m talking about those draining, circular debates where someone mashes together two completely different ideas: type safety and type convenience. They sound related. They both have “type” in …
I’ve spent years bouncing between codebases that treat types like holy scripture and ones where they’re barely a suggestion. The debate over type safety versus type convenience usually gets framed as a binary choice: you’re either in the strict typing camp or you’re not. That’s a lazy way to look at it. The actual question …
I’ve sat through enough code reviews and language debates to notice a pattern. Someone says, “We need type safety,” and the room nods. Then someone else says, “But that’s just inconvenient,” and the room splits. The problem isn’t that one side is wrong. The problem is we’re using the same words to mean different things. …