> ... a lot more time wrestling with the type system than I ever spent debugging memory errors in C
that's because for programs that you wrote in C, there exists hidden issues that you never paid a cost to fix (which, potentially saved you the effort if in practise it never was problematic). In rust (or haskell perhaps?), you pay that cost up front, and then the "time lost" to debugging/runtime issues had it been in C wouldn't show up as a "reward"!
I find this to be a troubling way to think about programmer productivity - a lot of opponents to functional programming or formal methods use this point against it. Spending this large an amount of time, solving issues that _may_ not be a real issue in production, just isn't worth the cost. I don't agree, but i suppose it's a judgement call for the programmer.
that's because for programs that you wrote in C, there exists hidden issues that you never paid a cost to fix (which, potentially saved you the effort if in practise it never was problematic). In rust (or haskell perhaps?), you pay that cost up front, and then the "time lost" to debugging/runtime issues had it been in C wouldn't show up as a "reward"!
I find this to be a troubling way to think about programmer productivity - a lot of opponents to functional programming or formal methods use this point against it. Spending this large an amount of time, solving issues that _may_ not be a real issue in production, just isn't worth the cost. I don't agree, but i suppose it's a judgement call for the programmer.