clojure-europe 2023-09-29

does this always happen with typed langs ? i started out trying to port a clj/s lib to typescript and now i'm browsing https://github.com/ronami/meta-typing for all the hacks^h^h^h^h^htechniques to do transformations on types 😭

mccraigmccraig15:09:14

they are neat tricks, but i can't help but wish that types were plain old data structures and i could create new types with all the usual functions, like you can with https://github.com/LuxLang/lux#types

Ed15:09:13

I think that typescript is unusual in that it has a turing complete type system. Which always seems a bit like missing the point of type systems to me. But it does let you write things like this:

const thing = { key: { map: ['of', 'values'] } } as const;
type ThingKeys = keyof typeof thing;
const f = (t: ThingKeys) => thing[t];
f('key');

which might come somewhere near types that are "plain old data structures"

mccraigmccraig16:09:54

i gather haskell and scala have turing complete type systems too...

mccraigmccraig16:09:05

and i know lisps are unusual in having the base language available at compile-time, but lux's approach of encoding types in plain old data structures in the base language sure seems nice compared to having a completely separate and quite weird type language!

mccraigmccraig16:09:26

but meanwhile, i seem to be constructing filter and map functions on types with typescripts conditional recursive and mapped types, so it's a weird kinda fun 😀

Ed17:09:42

;) ... I'd not looked into lux before ... I'll have to add it to the reading list ;)

mccraigmccraig17:09:15

it's an interesting language with some very neat ideas (e.g. monadic macros... like a state-monad where the state is the full compiler state, itself just another plain old data structure)... but it's been around for a while and doesn't seem to have gotten much momentum

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2023-09-29

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