Are the supposed advantages in a typed languages hype?

Jesse Wright
4 min readJan 13, 2023

People ignore packing and alignment rules. People forget programmer productivity.

Photo by Andreas Klassen on Unsplash

It is common to state that typed languages are better than untyped languages. A standard extension to untyped languages is to add types to create a new language. I will discuss the false assumption of the superiority of typed languages.

The argument ignores computer packing and alignment rules and programmer productivity.

The first argument is size.

The modern chip packing and alignment is on 32 or 64-bit boundaries. That means a structure of two 8-bit bytes is 64 or 128 bits long. So you are not saving space over just having two untyped integers. All variables start the same way on those boundaries.

The only place typing is necessary is I/O to external devices that don’t use strings in the interface. Rather than polluting all of your code, it is better to have an interface library. In all untyped languages, there are a set of functions, usually called pack and unpack.

The only exception is a binary time which requires some post-processing.

The second argument is performance.

If you have types that don’t agree with the computer typing and alignment…

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Jesse Wright

Learning to be a writer. Ex-Grey beard programmer, now retired. Extensive wide ranging reader. Proud Democrat and Liberal and Atheist. Bipolar but Medicated.