Ask HN: What is it like working on a large dynamically-typed codebase?

I have worked on small-to-medium projects but only in strongly typed languages such as Java or TypeScript. I rely heavily on my IDE to tell me where a field is used, or to allow me to rename a method and still be confident that the callers have been updated, or add a parameter to a method and know my code won’t compile until I’ve fixed the callers. I can’t see how this can work at scale in a large project without compile-time typesafety. I suppose 100% test coverage could provide some of the benefits, but not all. If you’ve worked on a large Python or JS codebase, what was it like to work in? How did you make small refactors for example?
Story Published at: January 30, 2023 at 06:58PM