Typing Resistance

I assure you, this is a post about programming, it’ll just take a few paragraphs to get there.

There’s a biological mechanism known as resistance, and it plays out in many different systems. For example, as you habitually drink more alcohol, you gain a tolerance, which prevents you from getting drunk as easily. This can be called alcohol resistance. When you habitually run high levels of insulin, your body becomes less sensitive to insulin, making you insulin resistant. When you go into a loud room, your ears adjust down the sound, making you noise resistant. And when you change enough dirty diapers, you become smell resistant.

Resistance applies not just at the biological level. Consider a car crash. The first time your car is in a crash, it is impacted in a major way. But after repeated crashes, the damage goes down, as your car attains crash resistance. The first time a baseball goes through a window, it shatters. But further impact between the shards and balls causes less damage. This is impact resistance.

Resistance isn’t a term we often use in the programming world. That’s a mistake I intend to rectify today.

Imagine you’re working on a Python application. Python is a memory managed language, so you have never seen a segfault. One day, you’re testing your code, and poof, a wild segfault appears! You will respond to it far more strongly than a C programmer, who has built up a healthy memory bug resistance over the years. And, as a result, you may begin to develop some of that alcohol resistance I mentioned above.

But I’m not here to talk about Python, because no one uses Python in the real world. Instead, let’s discuss Haskell.

In Haskell, we can use strong typing techniques to great effect, such as:

• Avoiding 404 errors in a web application with type-safe URLs.
• Ensuring proper character encoding handling by differentiating textual and binary data.
• Making Software Transactional Memory safe by quarantining effects.

The problem is that we use it everywhere. Like any system, this overuse of typing builds up a resistance. When someone is insulin sensitive, and you give them a small dose of insulin, they respond quickly. When they are insulin resistant, that same dose produces almost no impact. The same is true with typing.

Every single expression and subexpression in Haskell is typed. Sure, there’s type inference and the programmer doesn’t have to spell it out. But it’s still there. The effects can still be felt. You cannot escape the reality that, when you hit compile, an Abstract Syntax Tree annotated with types is being generated. One of the intermediate languages used by GHC—Core—type annotates everything!

The types are there, just like insulin. And just like insulin, whether we realize it or not, our bodies and minds are slowly building up resistance to it.

With insulin resistance, the body produces ever-increasing amounts of insulin to overcome the resistance, until the levels are so high that they cause damage. So, too, with types: Haskellers end up using more and more types in their code until they buckle under the strain. Their minds break down, their tools break, runtime errors slip in, performance suffers.

Types, like insulin, are not evil. But they need to be moderated.

There is no future for a language like Haskell. It dictates overuse—nay, abuse—of types. It is inhumane and immoral to subject our computers to such torture. We need to immediately reduce our dependence on types, and then—when type sensitivity is reestablished—carefully and moderately add them back in.

Python took this too far, by fully eliminating types. It’s literally impossible in Python to even get a type error, even at runtime. That’s absurd and is just as bad as a body with no insulin production at all. However, Python heads in the right direction. We need a blend of Python’s complete lack of a type system, and Haskell’s ability to use types in the right location.

Therefore, I’m announcing today the creation of a new language: Paskell. It, fortunately, is an unused name and sounds nothing like any other programming language ever before created.

And for those who want to learn more, you can watch this video where I describe in more detail how I truly feel about types.