The basic concepts of type theory are fundamental to computer science, logic and mathematics. Indeed, the language of type theory connects these regions of science. It plays a role in computing and information science akin to that of set theory in pure mathematics. There are many excellent accounts of the basic ideas of type theory, especially at the interface of computer science and logic — specifically, in the literature of programming languages, semantics, formal methods and automated reasoning. Most of these are very technical, dense with formulas, inference rules, and computation rules. Here we follow the example of the mathematician Paul Halmos, who in 1960 wrote a 104-page book called Naïve Set Theory intended to make the subject accessible to practicing mathematicians. His book served many generations well. This article follows the spirit of Halmos ’ book and introduces type theory without recourse to precise axioms and inference rules, and with a minimum of formalism. I start by paraphrasing the preface to Halmos ’ book. The sections of this article follow his chapters closely. Every computer scientist agrees that every computer scientist must know some type theory; the disagreement begins in trying to decide how much is some. This article contains my partial answer to that question. The purpose of the article is to tell the beginning student of advanced computer science the basic type theoretic facts of life, and to do so with a minimum of philosophical discourse and logical formalism. The point throughout is that of a prospective computer scientist eager to study programming languages, or database systems, or computational complexity theory, or distributed systems or information discovery. In type theory, “naïve ” and “formal ” are contrasting words. The present treatment might best be described as informal type theory from a naïve point of view. The concepts are very general and very abstract; therefore they may

This article follows the spirit of Halmos' book and introduces type theory without recourse to precise axioms and inference rules, and with a minimum of formalism. I start by paraphrasing the preface to Halmos' book. The sections of this article follow his chapters closely. Every computer scientist agrees that every computer scientist must know some type theory; the disagreement begins in trying to decide how much is some. This article contains my partial answer to that question. The purpose of the article is to tell the beginning student of advanced computer science the basic type theoretic facts of life, and to do so with a minimum of philosophical discourse and logical formalism. The point throughout is that of a prospective computer scientist eager to study programming languages, or database systems, or computational complexity theory, or distributed systems or information discovery

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