Alexis King just published a great blog post titled “No, dynamic type systems are not inherently more open”.

That reminded me of the talk I gave last year at FOSDEM, titled “Minimalism versus types”, where I advocated for static types from a slightly different angle. I tried to convince people that types in dynamically-typed programs are often more complicated than people realize. And often more complicated than in typical statically-typed languages.

People often say the opposite, that static type systems are more complicated, and dynamically-typed languages are simpler. At the surface level, this seems true: in a dynamic world you just go merrily declaring variables, assigning values and doing things with them, without ever having to write down any types, no matter how trivial or complex they are. Things can’t get any simpler in the typing department than “doing nothing”, right?

Well, types are nothing more than the shapes and allowed behaviors of your data. So it’s not like you don’t have shapes and behaviors in any program, regardless of the language… so, you have types, whether you write them or not. They are there, even in assembly language, even if at a conceptual level, as the sets of “valid values” your program can manipulate. And you have to think about them, and they have to make sense, and they have to do the right thing. So, in short, in a correct dynamically-typed program the types need to be just as correct as they are in a statically-typed one (or else you’ll get runtime errors).

In other words, the types are there, but you have to run the type checker in your head. And you know what’s funny? When people don’t write down the types, they often end up with types that are often more complicated than the types from people who do write them. The complexity just goes under the radar, so it piles up.

One day you open that module which you haven’t touched in six months, and you see a function call where the third argument is null. You need to remember what kinds of variables you can pass to that third argument, or read the whole source code to figure it out. You follow through the code to see all places that third argument is used and realize the accepted type of the third argument depends on what you give to the second argument. Congratulations, you’re dealing with a dependent type, which means you’ve just surpassed Haskell in terms of type system complexity. Compilers that deal with this kind of type system are so complex they are effectively proof assistants (and are at the forefront of programming language research), and here you are dealing with those data types with your brain (and your faith in your ability to come up with sufficient tests) alone.

Given that there is no mechanical type checker to prescribe what is expressible, and that the dynamic runtime will accept anything as long as the program doesn’t crash, when doing typechecking in your head you essentially have the world’s most powerful and complicated type checker at your disposal. And once you start making use of this power, you end up dealing with the world’s most complicated type system.

And when you give people expressive power, they use it. In my experience, people go wild constructing complicated structures in dynamic languages that they normally wouldn’t in static languages. It’s not that static languages are less powerful (Turing equivalence, blah blah), but they make the things you’re doing more obvious to you (Alexis’s post has some great examples). In a dynamically-typed program people are all to keen to make variables and data structures perform double or triple duty (“this is a X but also a Y under circumstances Z”), but when they have to write down what they’re doing as types, it’s like a little conscience check, and they think twice before creating a more complex type for something that could be described in a simpler way (simple example: they’ll probably make two plain functions instead of making one function that takes a string argument that changes the behavior of other arguments). Static types nudge you towards simpler, less “clever” solutions (and we all know what kind of solution is more maintainable in the long run).

But okay, let’s assume we avoid “clever” and pick the same solutions in either. Writing the same program in a static or a dynamic language to process the same data in the same way, you will end up with values of roughly the same types in both. The fact that the variables have static types or not does not change that.

“But in a dynamic language I don’t have to write the types! It’s less work!”

“Not having to” write types but having to think about them anyway is like doing math “not having to” write anything down and doing all calculations in your head. How is it an advantage to not use pen and paper to track down your train of thought as you do a complex calculation, and instead be restricted to do it only in your head? And how is an advantage to not have a mechanical tool — like a calculator, which can actually compute the things you wrote down — to check whether what you wrote with pen and paper makes sense?

I’m lazy, so I hate doing any math in my head. I’ll take writing things down and have a machine check it for me any day of the week. Why wouldn’t I want the same when programming? That’s what computers are for, right? To save us from computing things in our head. So I’ll write my types, and have the compiler check whether they make sense, thank you very much. It’s less work.

Lua does not have error checking/propagation primitives (like `?` or `!` operators in newer languages). The usual convention is to use plain old `if` statements:

local ok, err = do_something()
if err then
   return nil, err
end

So any call that propagates an error ends up at least 4 lines long. This has an impact on the programmer’s “threshold” for deciding that something is worth refactoring into a function as opposed to programming-by-copy-and-paste.

(An aside: I know that in recent years it has been trendy to defend copy-and-paste programming as a knee-jerk response against Architecture Astronauts who don’t know the difference between abstraction and indirection layers — maybe a topic for another blog post? — but, like the Astronauts who went too far in one direction by following a mantra without understanding the principles, the copy-pasters are now too far in the other direction, leading to lots of boilerplate code that looks like productivity but can pile up into a mess.)

So, today I had a bit of code that looked like this:

local gpg = cfg.variables.GPG
local gpg_ok, err = fs.is_tool_available(gpg, "gpg")
if not gpg_ok then
   return nil, err
end

When I had to do the same thing in another function, the immediate reaction was to try to turn this into a nice five-line function and just `local gpg = get_gpg()` in both places. However, when we account to error checking, this would end up amounting to:

local function get_gpg()
   local gpg = cfg.variables.GPG
   local gpg_ok, err = fs.is_tool_available(gpg, "gpg")
   if not gpg_ok then
      return nil, err
   end
   return gpg
end

local function foo(...)
   local gpg, err = get_gpg()
   if not gpg then
      return nil, err
   end
   ...
end

local function bar(...)
   local gpg, err = get_gpg()
   if not gpg then
      return nil, err
   end
   ...
end

where as the “copy-paste” version would look like:

local function foo(...)
   local gpg = cfg.variables.GPG
   local gpg_ok, err = fs.is_tool_available(gpg, "gpg")
   if not gpg_ok then
      return nil, err
   end
   ...
end

local function bar(...)
   local gpg = cfg.variables.GPG
   local gpg_ok, err = fs.is_tool_available(gpg, "gpg")
   if not gpg_ok then
      return nil, err
   end
   ...
end

It is measurably less code. But it spreads the dependency on the external `cfg` and `fs` modules in two places, and adds two bits of code must remain in sync. So the shorter version is less maintainable, or in other words, more bug-prone in the long run.

It is unfortunate that overly verbose error handling drives the programmer towards the worse choice software-engineering-wise.

Sometimes when working on a branch, you end up with a “wip” or “fixup” commit that contains changes to several files:

01a25e6 introduce raccoon library
bd197ac modify core to use raccoon
02890e3 add --raccoon option to the CLI
f938740 fixes
fab9379 add documentation on raccoon features

Our f938740 fixes commit has changes that really belong in the three previous commits. Before merging, we want to squash those changes in the original commits where the correct code should have been in the first place.

The typical way to do this is to use interactive rebase, using git rebase -i.

This is not a post explaining interactive rebase, so check out some other sources before proceeding if you are not familiar with it!

Splitting things from a “fixup” commit can get tedious using git rebase -i in conjunction with the edit option and git add -p, especially when you really know that all changes to a file belong to a certain commit.

Here’s a quick script for the rescue: it is designed to be used during an interactive rebase, and splits the current commit into multiple commits, one with the contents of each file:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

message="$(git log --pretty=format:'%s' -n1)"

if [ `git status --porcelain --untracked-files=no | wc -l` = 0 ]
then
   git reset --soft HEAD^
fi

git status --porcelain --untracked-files=no | while read status file
do
   echo $status $file

   if [ "$status" = "M" ]
   then
      git add $file
      git commit -n $file -m "$file: $message"
   elif [ "$status" = "A" ]
   then
      git add $file
      git commit -n $file -m "added $file: $message"
   elif [ "$status" = "D" ]
   then
      git rm $file
      git commit -n $file -m "removed $file: $message"
   else
      echo "unknown status $file"
   fi
done

Save this as split-files.sh (and make it executable with chmod +x split-files.sh).

Now, we proceed with the interactive rebase. When doing an interactive rebase, Git will open a text editor: in the commit you want to split, replace pick with edit:

pick 01a25e6 introduce raccoon library
pick bd197ac modify core to use raccoon
pick 02890e3 add --raccoon option to the CLI
edit f938740 fixes
pick fab9379 add documentation on raccoon features

# Rebase 01a25e6..fab9379 onto cb370a2 (5 commands)
#
# Commands:
# p, pick  = use commit
# r, reword  = use commit, but edit the commit message
# e, edit  = use commit, but stop for amending
# ...

When you save and exit the text editor launched by Git, you will return to the prompt with the repo's HEAD pointing at the commit we will split. Then run ./split-files.sh and then git rebase --continue.

Now launch the interactive rebase again. Your commits should look like this:

pick 01a25e6 introduce raccoon library
pick bd197ac modify core to use raccoon
pick 02890e3 add --raccoon option to the CLI
pick 8369783 src/lib/racoon.foo: fixes
pick a3c4e42 src/cli/foobar: fixes
pick 108a931 src/core/core.foo: fixes
pick fab9379 add documentation on raccoon features

# Rebase 01a25e6..fab9379 onto cb370a2 (7 commands)
#
# Commands:
# p, pick  = use commit
# r, reword  = use commit, but edit the commit message
# e, edit  = use commit, but stop for amending
# ...

The "fixes" commit in our example was split into three. Now move these new commits around and use the fixup command to merge them to the commit immediately above it:

pick 01a25e6 introduce raccoon library
fixup 8369783 src/lib/racoon.foo: fixes
pick bd197ac modify core to use raccoon
fixup 108a931 src/core/core.foo: fixes
pick 02890e3 add --raccoon option to the CLI
fixup a3c4e42 src/cli/foobar: fixes
pick fab9379 add documentation on raccoon features

# Rebase 01a25e6..fab9379 onto cb370a2 (7 commands)
#
# Commands:
# p, pick  = use commit
# r, reword  = use commit, but edit the commit message
# e, edit  = use commit, but stop for amending
# ...

Save, exit, and we're done! But a word of warning: when moving commits around make sure there are no other commits that change the same part of the file in between your "fixes" commit and the one you're squashing it into. When in doubt, Gitk and similar tools make it easier to check this before you jump into squashing commits.

If everything went well, our history now looks like this:

8370e83 introduce raccoon library
038c5a3 modify core to use raccoon
bb9783a add --raccoon option to the CLI
fab9379 add documentation on raccoon features

The SHA hashes of the commits have changed, because they now contain the fixes merged into them, and the separate catch-all "fixes" commit is now gone for good!

Of course this is a bit of an ideal scenario where each file goes neatly into a separate commit. Sometimes changes made to a single file belong in separate commits. In those cases, the solution is a bit more manual, using edit and then git add -p, which is super useful.

And remember, if any moment you messed up, git reflog is your best friend! But this is a topic for another time. Cheers!

A user in the Lua mailing list recently asked the following question:

yield( splits[i-1][1]..word[i+1]..word[i]..splits[i+2][2] )

I tried table.concat and string.format, but both perform worst. This was
counter-intuitive to me, because Lua string concat generates copies of
intermediate strings. However, seems that for short strings and small number
of concatenated strings, string __concat performs better than string.format
or table.concat. Does anyone know if my observation is true?

The “folk wisdom” about copies of intermediate strings in Lua is often mis-stated, I think.

("aa"):upper() .. ("bb"):upper() .. ("cc"):upper() .. ("dd"):upper()

It translates to a single concatenation bytecode in both Lua and LuaJIT, so it produces the following strings in memory over the course of its execution:

"aa"
"bb"
"cc"
"dd"
"AA"
"BB"
"CC"
"DD"
"AABBCCDD"

This, on the other hand, does generate intermediate strings:

local s = ""
for _, w in ipairs({"aa", "bb", "cc", "dd"})
   s = s .. w:upper()
end

It produces

""
"aa"
"bb"
"cc"
"dd"
"AA"
"BB"
"CC"
"DD"
"AABB"
"AABBCC"
"AABBCCDD"

Notice the little pyramid at the end. This pattern is the one that people tell to avoid when they talk about “intermediate strings”. For a loop like that, one should do instead:

local t = {}
for _, w in ipairs({"aa", "bb", "cc", "dd"})
   table.insert(s, w:upper())
end
local s = table.concat(t)

That will produce:

"aa"
"bb"
"cc"
"dd"
"AA"
"BB"
"CC"
"DD"
"AABBCCDD"

plus an extra table. Of course this is an oversimplified example for illustration purposes, but often the loop is long and the naive approach above can produce a huge pyramid of intermediate strings.

Over the years, the sensible advice was somehow distorted into some “all string concatenation is evil” cargo-cult, but that is not true, especially for short sequences of concatenations in an expression. Using a..b..c will usually be cheaper and produce less garbage than either string.format(”%s%s%s”, a, b, c) or table.concat({a, b, c}).

I am extremely happy to announce LuaRocks 3.0.0beta1, the almost-finished package for the new major release of LuaRocks, the Lua package manager.

First of all: “Why beta1?” — the code itself is release-candidate
quality, but I decided to call this one beta1 and not rc1 because the
Windows package is not ready yet, and I wanted to get some early
feedback on the Unix build while I complete the final touches of the
Windows package.

This is NOT going to be a long-or-endless beta cycle: if no major
showstoppers are reported, the final 3.0.0 release, including Unix and
Windows packages, is expected to arrive in one week. But please, if
you want to help out with LuaRocks, give this beta1 a try and report
any findings!

Yes, it’s finally here! After a way-too-long gestation period, LuaRocks 3 is about ready to see the light of day. And it includes a lot of new stuff:

• New rockspec format
• New commands, including `luarocks init` for per-project workflows
• New flags, including `–lua-dir` and `–lua-version` for using
• multiple Lua installs with a single LuaRocks
• New build system, gearing towards a new distribution model
• General improvements, including namespaces
• User-visible changes, including some breaking changes
• Internal changes

All of the above are detailed here:

https://github.com/luarocks/luarocks/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

I’ll try to write up more documentation between now and the final release. Feedback is wanted regarding what needs to be documented/explained! And help updating the wiki is especially welcome.

And without further ado, the tarball for Unix is here:

https://luarocks.github.io/luarocks/releases/luarocks-3.0.0beta1.tar.gz

This release contains new code by Thijs Schreijer, George Roman, Peter Melnichenko, Kim Alvefur, Alec Larson, Evgeny Shulgin, Michal Cichra, Daniel Hahler, and myself.

Very special thanks to my employer Kong, for sponsoring my work on LuaRocks over the last year and making this release possible. Thanks also to my colleagues Aapo Talvensaari and Enrique García Cota for helping out with some last-minute testing.

In the name of everyone in the LuaRocks development team, thank you for the continued amazing support that Lua community has been giving LuaRocks over the years: keep on rockin’!

Cheers!!!