Item — HN Reader

Let's be fair here, while you can detect invalid internal links in dynamic languages at runtime, the end result is basically the same for the user - a 404 or a 503 are equally bad in this case.

That's the advantage of compiled languages over dynamic ones in these kinds of scenarios: you sacrifice immediate feedback during development to gain a guarantee from the compiler that all invariants you embedded in the application uphold. And the more powerful the language/compiler combination, the more compile-time guarantees you can specify.

1 comments

Users of dynamic languages tend to use tests to check for errors that stronger types might catch (like broken links), but I agree having a formal guarantee is a slight advantage, though not specific to Haskell. Golang for example could easily provide similar checking.

The linked website is beautifully done, and the language does look interesting, I just find the hyperbole about static types making websites magically secure a little over-egged - it's still easy to mess up security or create subtle bugs even if you have strong guarantees about some parts of your code at compile time provided by types.