10 ms·

Have Static Languages Won?

53 points by tbirdz 11y ago

facepalm 11y ago
Which static language should supposedly have won?
- creshal 11y ago
  Apparently the emergence of Go, Rust et al. is a sign that static typing has "won". I'd more argue it's a sign that C and its derivatives are ripe to be replaced.
- sagichmal 11y ago
  > Which static language should supposedly have won? It's absolutely not that specific static languages have "won". But rather that the latest crop of static languages have proved that the oft-cited downsides of static typing, e.g. type stuttering in declarations, can be pragmatically addressed by other means, e.g. type inference. As such, the cost differential of static languages over dynamic is reduced to near-zero, and all of the benefits remain. I don't really see an argument, or really counter-argument, in the linked post. The author complains that the current crop of dynamic languages are badly implemented, but I'm not sure that holds water when you look at e.g. Clojure. They claim the chief advantage of static languages is IDE support/integration, but that seems like a strawman to me, a fringe benefit of the real, structural advantages of an explicit type layer.
  - creshal 11y ago
    > But rather that the latest crop of static languages have proved that the oft-cited downsides of static typing, e.g. type stuttering in declarations, can be pragmatically addressed by other means, e.g. type inference. Meanwhile, dynamic languages like Python are adding type hints, to give many of the benefits of static typing while retaining full dynamic semantics. The lines are getting blurry. IMO a good sign.
  - facepalm 11y ago
    So basically Scala and Haskell? I've tried Go but was turned off by the complexity of writing a sort function - an artifact of static typing. Seems to me you'll always end up with something like generics which becomes complicated quickly?
    - brianwawok 11y ago
      I mean every language has a baked in sort function, so maybe that is a bad place to start :) Java collection signatures are not super complex but they have fundamental bugs fixed in the slightly more complex scala collections type signatures.
      - facepalm 11y ago
        No I mean using the sort framework of Go. It takes several steps to set up a comparator function. compared to list.sort(function(a,b){return comparisonResult}) that was very demotivating to me.
        ldrndll 11y ago
        It seems like quite a few people have found that the simplicity of Go's type system just winds up transferring the complexity to your code base, instead of in the language implementation. I find it interesting how divided the opinions are on this.
    - sagichmal 11y ago
      There's no complexity involved in implementing the sort.Sort interface in Go. Some typing, but certainly no complexity.
azaras 11y ago
An alternative is optional static languages like Groovy or alternatives like python Type Hints (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/) are better than pure dynamic languages.
- jayvanguard 11y ago
  I agree, I think optional or gradual typing is the future for dynamic languages.
  - brianwawok 11y ago
    So a big project with optional typing. How do you handle it? Each person picks a level? Or make rules that all services are strongly typed but within a method is loosy goosy? I see the project going one of two ways. One all loosy goosy. One all statically typed. At which point what did optional typing add? Pick a side and go for it.
    - jayvanguard 11y ago
      I see it as a gradual thing. Early in the project loosey and then as the software matures add in more typing. But yeah, everyone needs to agree on the right level for that stage in the project.
      - dllthomas 11y ago
        You seem to be under the impression that types are for late stage development. I find them indispensable early on. First, because they let me feel out where my assumptions conflict, often before I've gotten to writing the bit of code that will make it obvious. Second, because when my assumptions are wrong, the type checker is a tremendous help refactoring - telling me all the places my old code is incompatible with my new assumptions. Both of these mean I don't need to be quite as sure that I've got things exactly right as I start coding.
- vorg 11y ago
imglorp 11y ago
Won ... for what job? Dynamics have their places.
incepted 11y ago
They have won in theory: they are arguably better in every way than dynamically typed languages (DTL) in the sense that they offer all the advantages that used to be unique to DTL and, obviously, also all the advantages of STL (automatic refactorings, performance, ease of maintenance, etc...). Javascript is the last serious holdover of the DTL generation but even it is showing tendencies to be replaced by STL (Typescript, Dart). It will take a while, though, but the trend is clear.
- martythemaniak 11y ago
  I think what we've seen over the last decade or so is that STLs have been updated with a lot of the features people loved about DTLs, while DTLs have not been able to add the features people love about STLs. Ultimately, I guess it was easier to add lambdas to Java than to add solid IDE support to javascript.
- idibidiart 11y ago
  Replaced? I can't see that happening in the next 5 years (an eternity in this business) Supplemented with tools like Flow? That's already a huge thing, and it's part of the React and React Native tool belt.
  - iheartmemcache 11y ago
    The whole reason Flow was invented was because Javascript was un-managable at scale without types. The whole "both" (i.e. gradual typing a la Typed Racket/Clojure/TypeScript) is probably solution. Interestingly the author has an article on that too which is a fairly good read[1]. [1] http://pointersgonewild.com/2012/11/09/static-vs-dynamic-why-not-both/ http://pointersgonewild.com/2012/11/09/static-vs-dynamic-why...
ajuc 11y ago
Are go/rust really that popular? I always thought they are even more niche than clojure.
- ainar-g 11y ago
  Both RedMonk [1] and TIOBE [2] indexes (both flawed, but better than nothing) show that Go is somewhat more popular than Clojure. Rust is still behind, but it hit its 1.0 relatively recently, so it's just getting started. [1] http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/07/01/language-rankings-6-15/ http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/07/01/language-rankings-6-15... [2] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....
realharo 11y ago
>You can have statically compiled languages that use type inference to realize what is effectively dynamic typing. Just because you don't have to explicitly write out the type does not make it any less static. I believe that the usual arguments against languages with static typing such as verbosity and lack of flexibility are largely eliminated by the more modern languages such as Scala, Kotlin or Typescript (though typescript is more "optional typing" than static really).
- coldtea 11y ago
  >Just because you don't have to explicitly write out the type does not make it any less static. No, but not having to write the type was one of the biggest attractions of dynamic languages -- a lot of us didn't care that much for being fully dynamic, but just enjoyed the less ceremony of dynamic languages. As for not having to commit to types for some cases, STL languages can also have a "void *" or "variant" or "dynamic" type (a la C#).
  - nrinaudo 11y ago
    There is one other undeniable advantage to dynamic languages: you can express things in a dynamic language that you can't in a static one. Static languages try to be as sound as possible, at the cost of some completeness. Dynamic languages are less concerned with soundness and can be more complete. As an example, duck typing is usually not possible to achieve in a static language - it's really hard to allow duck typing and remain sound (I don't actually know that it's possible, but I'm not sure either way). Having said that, I'm firmly of the opinion that static languages are much, much easier to write in and maintain once you get the hang of whatever type system they use, and the loss of completeness is acceptable for all the benefits they bring.
    - rwmj 11y ago
      OCaml has duck typing for objects (strictly speaking it is "structural typing").
      - 11y ago
hcarvalhoalves 11y ago
I think it can certainly win as the type systems / inference get better, and languages with those characteristics are ported to mature platforms with good libraries, etc. The real appeal of what we today call "dynamic languages" is leaving type-checking up to the programmer, so in essence all programs are typed - just so happens that some don't formalize it inside the code. A good compromise until then is gradual typing.
jinst8gmi 11y ago
It seems like a reasonable argument that there has been a dramatic rise in the number and popularity statically typed languages which feature type inference: Go, Rust, C# (to a limited extent), Scala, Swift etc. They combine the performance and safety of static typing without sacrificing expressiveness.
bshimmin 11y ago
Well, there's plenty of controversy in this one, but I think Compared to CS students, the average web developer is not as passionate about programming, and not as skilled a programmer. ...probably takes the biscuit; I'm not even sure where to start with it really, apart from my complete failure to understand how "web developers" and "CS students" are supposed to be two distinct groups which are able to be compared.
- nrinaudo 11y ago
  Not saying I agree, but there is this notion that "proper" CS students are interested in CS for its own sake - they're meant to find algorithms and data structures and programming paradigms inherently fun and interesting. Web developers are expected to be interested in the end-game, not the process - having a cool feature that works cross-browsers is something to be passionate about, the fact that it uses websockets is just plumbing. I hasten to add that I hold no official position on the matter and merely wanted to help you see how it's possible to consider CS graduates and web designers as too distincts sets.
- skylan_q 11y ago
  I'll tell you as a web developer who is a CS grad: CS students are terrible at programming and software development when compared to someone who does it for a living. It takes more than participation in a course to develop a skill. I understand the distinction: CS students get geared up to understand algorithms, languages, and theory. A web developer understands his tools, his workflow, his practice, and people's needs.
  - bshimmin 11y ago
    I remember my final project in my CS master's degree very fondly: I delivered a barely working piece of software in a totally arcane problem domain with a very complex set of instructions which enabled it to work, sort of, in one specific environment. My supervisor was delighted. In comparison with my battles to get something to work in both Firefox and IE6 a few months later in industry (in order to ship something that people's jobs actually depended on), it was an absolute walk in the park.
agentultra 11y ago
I hoped to have debunked, though not thoroughly, the myth that dynamic languages cannot scale to power large projects in my recent talk at Pycon CA. Just take a look at Openstack. It's powering clouds in CERN and Yahoo! Japan where it provides the infrastructure for delivering earthquake notifications to the public -- a valuable and critical service! And it's written largely in Python. It does rely on systems written in static languages and is itself written in one... but dynamic languages are very useful for a class of problem where deferring decisions about specifics until run-time is a huge advantage. Normally this is reserved for exploratory programming but in practice it is also useful for dynamically configured systems that can introspect themselves at run-time and change that configuration or adapt to unstructured input. Update: I'm also one of the unwashed masses that, gasp, didn't go to university and study PLT. I still have a dog-eared copy of SICP, The Dragon Book, Concrete Mathematics, et al... and started by making terrible pong clones and text adventures in BASIC on an Amiga 500.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >I hoped to have debunked, though not thoroughly, the myth that dynamic languages cannot scale to power large projects in my recent talk at Pycon CA. Just take a look at Openstack. It's powering clouds in CERN and Yahoo! Japan where it provides the infrastructure for delivering earthquake notifications to the public -- a valuable and critical service! And it's written largely in Python. That doesn't say much in itself though. Such infrastructure for "earthquake notification" could just be a few thousand lines or even mostly "glue" code. As you say "It does rely on systems written in static languages and is itself written in one" which kind of refutes the whole argument, doesn't it? >It does rely on systems written in static languages and is itself written in one... but dynamic languages are very useful for a class of problem where deferring decisions about specifics until run-time is a huge advantage. For those cases couldn't one just use a DSL or at worse an sandboxed isolated dynamic language from inside a STL talking care for the rest of the system? There are several "business rules" systems for STL.
  - mugsie 11y ago
    >That doesn't say much in itself though. Such infrastructure for "earthquake notification" could just be a few thousand lines or even mostly "glue" code. https://github.com/openstack/neutron https://github.com/openstack/neutron I assure you that OpenStack is a little more than "glue" code. Not sure what part of OpenStack is written in a STL, but the vast majority of its hundreds of thousands of lines of code is python.
braythwayt 11y ago
Betteridge's Law of Headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
bpicolo 11y ago
JavaScript, PHP, Python, and Ruby are all in the top 5 spots on GitHub. Java is the only STL that made the cut. There are certainly types of work that seem to favor dynamic languages, because they have the ability to do some interesting things. ORMs, for example, far more powerful in dynamic languages as far as I've encountered
- nerdy 11y ago
  Even PHP has trajectory toward static types. Some examples are Hack[1] and PHP7[2]. Check out the talk Rasmus gave at Etsy[3] for more about PHP7 changes but it looks like at least limited support for static or "strict" types (whatever subtle distinction that might be) has enough merit for PHP to implement after all this time. 1. http://hacklang.org/ http://hacklang.org/ 2. http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration70.new-features.php http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration70.new-features.php 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT4rRWKygq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT4rRWKygq0
  - captn3m0 11y ago
    PHP is still a dynamic language. PHP 7 gets us scalar typehinting support, which lets us check types at run-time. There are similar annotation based solutions for Ruby as well, which ultimately rely on a lot of Ruby's metaprogramming features. The idea behind these solutions is to have proper type support where you need it. You will have to pry duck-typing from my cold dead hands if you try to remove it from PHP/Ruby completely.
- jinst8gmi 11y ago
  > JavaScript, PHP, Python, and Ruby are all in the top 5 spots on GitHub. All of which are established languages created in the 90's. It takes time for languages which are rapidly gaining mindshare to gain marketshare on GitHub.
  - danmaz74 11y ago
    > It takes time for languages which are rapidly gaining mindshare Honestly curious: which new languages are those?
ilurkedhere 11y ago
You can go far, quickly with a dynamic language and that's often what you need in a startup environment.
coldtea 11y ago
No, Javascript has won, and it's dynamic. But people are starting to appreciate static typing assurances and IDE conveniences.
jayvanguard 11y ago
This post and the one that prompted it both seem to be begging the question. I don't see greater percentage use of static vs. dynamic languages now compared to ten or twenty years ago. There is a lot of interesting research into strong static type systems but that has been going on for ages (ML family of languages). In fact, I'd say if anything there is a big surge every decade or so in dynamic languages when a new problem space emerges. 90s - Perl, Javascript 00s - Ruby and Objective-C resurgence 10s - ES6 and JS related languages Once an area matures, the paranoid static type people come in and harden things. Then people realize they're getting nothing done and add DSLs on top for flexibility. And on it goes.
- tormeh 11y ago
  The C/C++ people aren't paranoid (JPL coders excepted). Otherwise they would be using something else. Ada users are paranoid and Java users are concerned about project cost.
eadz 11y ago
> Dynamic languages such as PHP, JS, Python and Ruby, in addition to being relatively poorly designed, are the languages that powered the explosion of the web The author seems to paint a broad brush in saying all dynamic languages are poorly designed. Languages can have different design goals. From Matz, Ruby's creator; > Instead of emphasizing the what, I want to emphasize the how part: how we feel while programming. That's Ruby's main difference from other language designs. I emphasize the feeling, in particular, how I feel using Ruby. ( http://www.artima.com/intv/rubyP.html http://www.artima.com/intv/rubyP.html ) So one of Ruby's primary design goals was programmer happiness, and in that respect it isn't not poorly designed at all. The technical 'perfection' of a programming language only matters to a point, it's us as programmers people that have to speak its language all day, and optimising for how we feel doing it is a valid design goal. I don't think it is a valid criticism to say something is poorly designed, without looking at its design goals. Every language is poorly designed in one way or another.
reacweb 11y ago
When I have started my carrier, it was unimaginable to use a dynamic language in a serious project. I was taught(!?) that the difference of development cost was very small. The mentalities have evolved. People know that you can drastically reduce the development costs (of small projects) by using dynamic languages. We know also that maintenance is more costly. Static languages are always improving to support features that used to exist only in dynamic languages. Dynamic languages evolve to support optional typing. The differences are reducing, but I think there is still a need for the 2 kind of languages. Often they are combined in big projects. For example c++/javascript in browser or c++/guile.
Thiz 11y ago
In academia and corporate? Sure. In real world? Php, Python, Ruby and Javascript still reign supreme. Mobile is another story since main platforms are controlled by corporations, but if it were for the hobbyists neither java nor swift would have had a chance.
- onion2k 11y ago
  It's worth noting that development workflow in small businesses and startups is rapidly shifting towards being more "corporate" though. Whereas a decade ago the tools necessary to write quality code needed a dedicated person to manage, now they can easily be set up and used in a few days by a single developer. That's going to drive the language of choice too - if used a typed language isn't going to be any harder than used a dynamic language then there's little reason to use a dynamic one.
- galactus 11y ago
  In what sense are academia and corporate not "the real world"?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    - the_af 11y ago
      In what sense are there no innovative projects in academia? Of all the criticisms that could be made of academic research and projects, this one just doesn't make sense!
fulafel 11y ago
Another perspective is that dynamic application programming languages were always the underdogs. Corporate Cobol/Java/C#/C++ programmers always outnumbered application programmers in dynamic languages outside the ad-hoc web scripting languages (PHP & JS). Clojure & other Lisps, Python, Erlang, Lua, and Ruby are all application programming languages first and web languages only incidentally (1). They all have clear strengths and are miles away from the horror of JS and PHP. I think it shows in the article that the author's thinking on dynamic languages is colored by Javascript and its propensity to hide bugs. This is worrying since it might signal that JS does this for many people :( (1) Admittedly Ruby is more strongly associated with Web nowadays due to Rails.
chaotic-good 11y ago
No, they didn't. This article is narrow minded and prejudiced. Of cause if we're talking about programming in general - static typing languages are often a better option. But programming doesn't ends there, there is technical computing, statistical computing, data analysis and so on. How about beating Python + numpy + pandas in data crunching or maybe R in statistics? In this fields underlying data types is almost always very simple, and because of this you simply can't benefit much from static typing. This is not about expressiveness (the article author is wrong here IMO). It's all about flexibility and (more important) interactivity. I can do useful things in ipython console or in ipython notebook in the browser. It's like a tiny lab for small and moderately sized things, data munging, analysis and visualization, prototyping and all this stuff. There is dynamic languages like Python, R and even MATLAB that's not going to disappear anytime soon. There is a new dynamic language called Julia that's only starts getting traction but IMO it's already more interesting then Rust, Go and Nim combined together.
- bostik 11y ago
  > How about beating Python + numpy + pandas in data crunching I'd think this sentiment misses a small bit of context. In the above combination, Python is the glue language, which merely makes it easy to dispatch the heavy lifting. Numpy is a damn good convenience wrapper around the under-the-hood number crunching engines - which themselves are written in static languages. I mean, have you ever tried to _build_ numpy from scratch? That thing pulls in both BLAS and LAPACK, some of the most heavily optimised libraries in the world. These fortran(!) libraries can trace their ancestry all the way to 1970's, and have benefited from aggressive optimisations done over the course of 4 decades. [0,1] So, invoking numpy as a testament to power of dynamic languages misses a pretty important point. And I say that as someone who loves Python, and uses it as a first-choice tool in perhaps 90% of use cases. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Linear_Algebra_Subprograms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Linear_Algebra_Subprogra... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAPACK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAPACK
  - Veedrac 11y ago
    > So, invoking numpy as a testament to power of dynamic languages misses a pretty important point. I don't think so. People build Numpy in a different language to the one they expose it in because those languages have different strengths. If Numpy's source languages (including BLAS and LAPACK) were suitable for front-end usage, Python would have never entered the equation. I think it's more a testament that despite the base libraries being so freely accessible, only dynamic languages have actually built front-ends that people want to use. Even Julia is dynamic.
programminggeek 11y ago
Short answer, no they haven't and they won't.
acbart 11y ago
I don't know, I'm taking a Program Analysis graduate seminar this semester, and my take is that the techniques for dynamic analysis are getting halfway decent. It's also interesting to compare Python and JavaScript. Holkner and Harland did a pair of papers about those two communities' usage of dynamic typing - JS people do type changes throughout the program execution, but after initialization the Python people follow the Aycock quote: "Giving people a dynamically-typed language does not mean that they write dynamically-typed programs." Languages have different characteristic programs, to some degree.
johngossman 11y ago
It might be an interesting contest to find the earliest reference to this debate. It isn't quite what I was looking for, but I found this short comparison of programming languages from 1972 amusing: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19720025540.pdf http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1972002... For example, this quote from the conclusion: "The possibility of standardization of computer languages is still remote, and in the author's opinion will remain so until standardization in hardware applied to standard problems is first achieved" Are we there yet?
mcv 11y ago
Static Languages won? That's not just a bit premature; it's bizarre. Several of the most popular and effective languages at the moment are dynamic: Python, Javascript, Ruby, PHP, all the LISP derivatives. I don't doubt that lots of new static languages have popped up, but how many people actually use those? Plenty of people use static languages, true, but those are mostly the old ones: Java, C, C++, C#, and Haskell and Scala. Any claim that this has been settled by some new languages nobody is using is bizarre.
dasboth 11y ago
Sweeping statements like "X programming language/paradigm has won" do an injustice to the wealth of uses of programming. You wouldn't use the same programming language to write code for an Arduino, a startup MVP web application, an enterprise desktop application etc. and there's no reason you should. Personally I developed most of my web apps in C# but I find Python great for prototyping and data analysis tasks. Why is there a need to declare a winner?
random_coder 11y ago
Availability of an interpreter has been one of the major advantages of programming in dynamic languages. With languages like Haskell, Scala coming with first class interpreters, this advantage is being lost to a certain extent. I think it should be possible to build interpreters even for mainstream static langs like C++ and Java, they probably exist already, though I'm not sure why they haven't found larger acceptance. I believe the biggest advantage with a good static type system is that programmers can design good datatypes and specify their relationships - and the compiler can then detect any inconsistencies(ideally anyway).
- brianwawok 11y ago
  Java take too much boilerplate. Who wants to use it in an interpeter? I do use a interpreter with both scala and python a lot.
hawski 11y ago
Article points to http://wtfjs.com/ http://wtfjs.com/ to show "glaring flaws" of JS. JavaScript is not perfect, but almost all what is presented on sites similar to wtfjs.com are non-issues to me. It may be stupid or surprising that API behaves in some ways, but as long as it behaves exactly as in documentation it is not much of a problem. I always check available documentation even for basic APIs in every language that I use. i.e. I was amazed that even senior developers at my previous job did not know that strncpy is practically useless. It was just `man strncpy` away. In a way static typing can save you just like reading of documentation, but in a more organized manner. That said you should still eat your ve^W^W^W read documentation. What helps in case of dynamic languages is REPL. It is even better than documentation sometimes. You can easly check every line with your reasoning. For C or C++ I always have some simple file for testing basic constructs to check my assumptions. One could argue that that is the role of unit tests, but one does not prevent the other. Unit tests are same thing, but in more organized manner.
- gnuvince 11y ago
  Two things: a) Maxime works on a compiler for JS, so even if something is documented to death, it usually makes analyses less precise and/or more complex. b) Many statically-typed languages have a REPL (OCaml, Haskell, Scala); this is not an issue with the typing discipline, but with the tools available to the developers.
  - dllthomas 11y ago
    With type inference, a REPL can even tell you things about code that can't run yet! Prelude> :t mapM undefined [5,6,7] mapM undefined [5,6,7] :: Monad m => m [b] This can get even more informative with Typed Holes: Prelude> mapM _whatFunc [5,6,7] <interactive>:14:6: Found hole ‘_whatFunc’ with type: Integer -> m b Where: ‘m’ is a rigid type variable bound by the inferred type of it :: m [b] at <interactive>:14:1 ‘b’ is a rigid type variable bound by the inferred type of it :: m [b] at <interactive>:14:1 Relevant bindings include it :: m [b] (bound at <interactive>:14:1) In the first argument of ‘mapM’, namely ‘_whatFunc’ In the expression: mapM _whatFunc [5, 6, 7] In an equation for ‘it’: it = mapM _whatFunc [5, 6, 7]
wmil 11y ago
Static languages haven't "won". There's just not much point in creating a new dynamic language. Ruby is flexible enough to turn into a DSL for whatever. Python does it's job very well. Lua has it's niche. Javascript is everywhere now. What can a new dynamic language do that isn't easier to accomplish with libraries? So most of the language development has gone towards making static typing easier to use. Improving on C++ / Java is easy. There are interesting ways to go about it with no clear right answer.
dugword 11y ago
"Dynamic languages are at a disadvantage. Most of the mainstream ones out there today were designed by amateurs, people with no formal CS background" Patently false. * from Wikipedia Python: Guido van Rossum * Master's degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Amsterdam * Recognized as a Distinguished Engineer by the Association for Computing Machinery Ruby: Yukihiro Matsumoto * Graduated with an information science degree from University of Tsukuba, where he was a member of Ikuo Nakata's research lab on programming languages and compilers JavaScript: Brendan Eich * Brendan Eich received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science at Santa Clara University. He received his master's degree in 1985 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Perl: Larry Wall .... Well I guess he doesn't have a formal CS background. But he was literally a NASA rocket scientist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#cite_ref-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#cite_ref-3
- rbehrends 11y ago
  You can also add: Lua: Roberto Ierusalimschy * Associate professor at PUC-Rio. Tcl: John Ousterhout * Professor of computer science at Stanford (and professor of computer science at Berkeley when he invented Tcl). Plus, Python's design was based on a teaching language (ABC) that was designed based on actual usability research. And, of course, this does not even count the classics (LISP, Smalltalk, Scheme) whose authors have pretty impressive academic pedigrees and whose designs inspired many of the more recent languages (e.g., the influences of Smalltalk and LISP on Ruby are pretty obvious).
- vorg 11y ago
  > Dynamic languages such as PHP, JS, Python and Ruby Don't forget the other dynamic language frequently mentioned in the article... PHP: Rasmus Lerdorf graduated in 1993 from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor of Applied Science in Systems Design Engineering. But perhaps the author's definition of "mainstream" includes languages of Groovy's degree of adoption.

53 points by tbirdz 11y ago

facepalm 11y ago

Which static language should supposedly have won?

creshal 11y ago
Apparently the emergence of Go, Rust et al. is a sign that static typing has "won". I'd more argue it's a sign that C and its derivatives are ripe to be replaced.
sagichmal 11y ago
> Which static language should supposedly have won? It's absolutely not that specific static languages have "won". But rather that the latest crop of static languages have proved that the oft-cited downsides of static typing, e.g. type stuttering in declarations, can be pragmatically addressed by other means, e.g. type inference. As such, the cost differential of static languages over dynamic is reduced to near-zero, and all of the benefits remain. I don't really see an argument, or really counter-argument, in the linked post. The author complains that the current crop of dynamic languages are badly implemented, but I'm not sure that holds water when you look at e.g. Clojure. They claim the chief advantage of static languages is IDE support/integration, but that seems like a strawman to me, a fringe benefit of the real, structural advantages of an explicit type layer.
- creshal 11y ago
  > But rather that the latest crop of static languages have proved that the oft-cited downsides of static typing, e.g. type stuttering in declarations, can be pragmatically addressed by other means, e.g. type inference. Meanwhile, dynamic languages like Python are adding type hints, to give many of the benefits of static typing while retaining full dynamic semantics. The lines are getting blurry. IMO a good sign.
- facepalm 11y ago
  So basically Scala and Haskell? I've tried Go but was turned off by the complexity of writing a sort function - an artifact of static typing. Seems to me you'll always end up with something like generics which becomes complicated quickly?
  - brianwawok 11y ago
    I mean every language has a baked in sort function, so maybe that is a bad place to start :) Java collection signatures are not super complex but they have fundamental bugs fixed in the slightly more complex scala collections type signatures.
    - facepalm 11y ago
      No I mean using the sort framework of Go. It takes several steps to set up a comparator function. compared to list.sort(function(a,b){return comparisonResult}) that was very demotivating to me.
      - ldrndll 11y ago
        It seems like quite a few people have found that the simplicity of Go's type system just winds up transferring the complexity to your code base, instead of in the language implementation. I find it interesting how divided the opinions are on this.
  - sagichmal 11y ago
    There's no complexity involved in implementing the sort.Sort interface in Go. Some typing, but certainly no complexity.

azaras 11y ago

An alternative is optional static languages like Groovy or alternatives like python Type Hints (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/) are better than pure dynamic languages.

jayvanguard 11y ago
I agree, I think optional or gradual typing is the future for dynamic languages.
- brianwawok 11y ago
  So a big project with optional typing. How do you handle it? Each person picks a level? Or make rules that all services are strongly typed but within a method is loosy goosy? I see the project going one of two ways. One all loosy goosy. One all statically typed. At which point what did optional typing add? Pick a side and go for it.
  - jayvanguard 11y ago
    I see it as a gradual thing. Early in the project loosey and then as the software matures add in more typing. But yeah, everyone needs to agree on the right level for that stage in the project.
    - dllthomas 11y ago
      You seem to be under the impression that types are for late stage development. I find them indispensable early on. First, because they let me feel out where my assumptions conflict, often before I've gotten to writing the bit of code that will make it obvious. Second, because when my assumptions are wrong, the type checker is a tremendous help refactoring - telling me all the places my old code is incompatible with my new assumptions. Both of these mean I don't need to be quite as sure that I've got things exactly right as I start coding.
vorg 11y ago

imglorp 11y ago

Won ... for what job? Dynamics have their places.

incepted 11y ago

They have won in theory: they are arguably better in every way than dynamically typed languages (DTL) in the sense that they offer all the advantages that used to be unique to DTL and, obviously, also all the advantages of STL (automatic refactorings, performance, ease of maintenance, etc...). Javascript is the last serious holdover of the DTL generation but even it is showing tendencies to be replaced by STL (Typescript, Dart). It will take a while, though, but the trend is clear.

martythemaniak 11y ago
I think what we've seen over the last decade or so is that STLs have been updated with a lot of the features people loved about DTLs, while DTLs have not been able to add the features people love about STLs. Ultimately, I guess it was easier to add lambdas to Java than to add solid IDE support to javascript.
idibidiart 11y ago
Replaced? I can't see that happening in the next 5 years (an eternity in this business) Supplemented with tools like Flow? That's already a huge thing, and it's part of the React and React Native tool belt.
- iheartmemcache 11y ago
  The whole reason Flow was invented was because Javascript was un-managable at scale without types. The whole "both" (i.e. gradual typing a la Typed Racket/Clojure/TypeScript) is probably solution. Interestingly the author has an article on that too which is a fairly good read[1]. [1] http://pointersgonewild.com/2012/11/09/static-vs-dynamic-why-not-both/ http://pointersgonewild.com/2012/11/09/static-vs-dynamic-why...

ajuc 11y ago

Are go/rust really that popular? I always thought they are even more niche than clojure.

ainar-g 11y ago
Both RedMonk [1] and TIOBE [2] indexes (both flawed, but better than nothing) show that Go is somewhat more popular than Clojure. Rust is still behind, but it hit its 1.0 relatively recently, so it's just getting started. [1] http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/07/01/language-rankings-6-15/ http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/07/01/language-rankings-6-15... [2] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

realharo 11y ago

>You can have statically compiled languages that use type inference to realize what is effectively dynamic typing. Just because you don't have to explicitly write out the type does not make it any less static. I believe that the usual arguments against languages with static typing such as verbosity and lack of flexibility are largely eliminated by the more modern languages such as Scala, Kotlin or Typescript (though typescript is more "optional typing" than static really).

coldtea 11y ago
>Just because you don't have to explicitly write out the type does not make it any less static. No, but not having to write the type was one of the biggest attractions of dynamic languages -- a lot of us didn't care that much for being fully dynamic, but just enjoyed the less ceremony of dynamic languages. As for not having to commit to types for some cases, STL languages can also have a "void *" or "variant" or "dynamic" type (a la C#).
- nrinaudo 11y ago
  There is one other undeniable advantage to dynamic languages: you can express things in a dynamic language that you can't in a static one. Static languages try to be as sound as possible, at the cost of some completeness. Dynamic languages are less concerned with soundness and can be more complete. As an example, duck typing is usually not possible to achieve in a static language - it's really hard to allow duck typing and remain sound (I don't actually know that it's possible, but I'm not sure either way). Having said that, I'm firmly of the opinion that static languages are much, much easier to write in and maintain once you get the hang of whatever type system they use, and the loss of completeness is acceptable for all the benefits they bring.
  - rwmj 11y ago
    OCaml has duck typing for objects (strictly speaking it is "structural typing").
    - 11y ago

hcarvalhoalves 11y ago

I think it can certainly win as the type systems / inference get better, and languages with those characteristics are ported to mature platforms with good libraries, etc. The real appeal of what we today call "dynamic languages" is leaving type-checking up to the programmer, so in essence all programs are typed - just so happens that some don't formalize it inside the code. A good compromise until then is gradual typing.

jinst8gmi 11y ago

It seems like a reasonable argument that there has been a dramatic rise in the number and popularity statically typed languages which feature type inference: Go, Rust, C# (to a limited extent), Scala, Swift etc. They combine the performance and safety of static typing without sacrificing expressiveness.

bshimmin 11y ago

Well, there's plenty of controversy in this one, but I think Compared to CS students, the average web developer is not as passionate about programming, and not as skilled a programmer. ...probably takes the biscuit; I'm not even sure where to start with it really, apart from my complete failure to understand how "web developers" and "CS students" are supposed to be two distinct groups which are able to be compared.

nrinaudo 11y ago
Not saying I agree, but there is this notion that "proper" CS students are interested in CS for its own sake - they're meant to find algorithms and data structures and programming paradigms inherently fun and interesting. Web developers are expected to be interested in the end-game, not the process - having a cool feature that works cross-browsers is something to be passionate about, the fact that it uses websockets is just plumbing. I hasten to add that I hold no official position on the matter and merely wanted to help you see how it's possible to consider CS graduates and web designers as too distincts sets.
skylan_q 11y ago
I'll tell you as a web developer who is a CS grad: CS students are terrible at programming and software development when compared to someone who does it for a living. It takes more than participation in a course to develop a skill. I understand the distinction: CS students get geared up to understand algorithms, languages, and theory. A web developer understands his tools, his workflow, his practice, and people's needs.
- bshimmin 11y ago
  I remember my final project in my CS master's degree very fondly: I delivered a barely working piece of software in a totally arcane problem domain with a very complex set of instructions which enabled it to work, sort of, in one specific environment. My supervisor was delighted. In comparison with my battles to get something to work in both Firefox and IE6 a few months later in industry (in order to ship something that people's jobs actually depended on), it was an absolute walk in the park.

agentultra 11y ago

I hoped to have debunked, though not thoroughly, the myth that dynamic languages cannot scale to power large projects in my recent talk at Pycon CA. Just take a look at Openstack. It's powering clouds in CERN and Yahoo! Japan where it provides the infrastructure for delivering earthquake notifications to the public -- a valuable and critical service! And it's written largely in Python. It does rely on systems written in static languages and is itself written in one... but dynamic languages are very useful for a class of problem where deferring decisions about specifics until run-time is a huge advantage. Normally this is reserved for exploratory programming but in practice it is also useful for dynamically configured systems that can introspect themselves at run-time and change that configuration or adapt to unstructured input. Update: I'm also one of the unwashed masses that, gasp, didn't go to university and study PLT. I still have a dog-eared copy of SICP, The Dragon Book, Concrete Mathematics, et al... and started by making terrible pong clones and text adventures in BASIC on an Amiga 500.

coldtea 11y ago
>I hoped to have debunked, though not thoroughly, the myth that dynamic languages cannot scale to power large projects in my recent talk at Pycon CA. Just take a look at Openstack. It's powering clouds in CERN and Yahoo! Japan where it provides the infrastructure for delivering earthquake notifications to the public -- a valuable and critical service! And it's written largely in Python. That doesn't say much in itself though. Such infrastructure for "earthquake notification" could just be a few thousand lines or even mostly "glue" code. As you say "It does rely on systems written in static languages and is itself written in one" which kind of refutes the whole argument, doesn't it? >It does rely on systems written in static languages and is itself written in one... but dynamic languages are very useful for a class of problem where deferring decisions about specifics until run-time is a huge advantage. For those cases couldn't one just use a DSL or at worse an sandboxed isolated dynamic language from inside a STL talking care for the rest of the system? There are several "business rules" systems for STL.
- mugsie 11y ago
  >That doesn't say much in itself though. Such infrastructure for "earthquake notification" could just be a few thousand lines or even mostly "glue" code. https://github.com/openstack/neutron https://github.com/openstack/neutron I assure you that OpenStack is a little more than "glue" code. Not sure what part of OpenStack is written in a STL, but the vast majority of its hundreds of thousands of lines of code is python.

braythwayt 11y ago

Betteridge's Law of Headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

bpicolo 11y ago

JavaScript, PHP, Python, and Ruby are all in the top 5 spots on GitHub. Java is the only STL that made the cut. There are certainly types of work that seem to favor dynamic languages, because they have the ability to do some interesting things. ORMs, for example, far more powerful in dynamic languages as far as I've encountered

nerdy 11y ago
Even PHP has trajectory toward static types. Some examples are Hack[1] and PHP7[2]. Check out the talk Rasmus gave at Etsy[3] for more about PHP7 changes but it looks like at least limited support for static or "strict" types (whatever subtle distinction that might be) has enough merit for PHP to implement after all this time. 1. http://hacklang.org/ http://hacklang.org/ 2. http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration70.new-features.php http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration70.new-features.php 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT4rRWKygq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT4rRWKygq0
- captn3m0 11y ago
  PHP is still a dynamic language. PHP 7 gets us scalar typehinting support, which lets us check types at run-time. There are similar annotation based solutions for Ruby as well, which ultimately rely on a lot of Ruby's metaprogramming features. The idea behind these solutions is to have proper type support where you need it. You will have to pry duck-typing from my cold dead hands if you try to remove it from PHP/Ruby completely.
jinst8gmi 11y ago
> JavaScript, PHP, Python, and Ruby are all in the top 5 spots on GitHub. All of which are established languages created in the 90's. It takes time for languages which are rapidly gaining mindshare to gain marketshare on GitHub.
- danmaz74 11y ago
  > It takes time for languages which are rapidly gaining mindshare Honestly curious: which new languages are those?

ilurkedhere 11y ago

You can go far, quickly with a dynamic language and that's often what you need in a startup environment.

coldtea 11y ago

No, Javascript has won, and it's dynamic. But people are starting to appreciate static typing assurances and IDE conveniences.

jayvanguard 11y ago

This post and the one that prompted it both seem to be begging the question. I don't see greater percentage use of static vs. dynamic languages now compared to ten or twenty years ago. There is a lot of interesting research into strong static type systems but that has been going on for ages (ML family of languages). In fact, I'd say if anything there is a big surge every decade or so in dynamic languages when a new problem space emerges. 90s - Perl, Javascript 00s - Ruby and Objective-C resurgence 10s - ES6 and JS related languages Once an area matures, the paranoid static type people come in and harden things. Then people realize they're getting nothing done and add DSLs on top for flexibility. And on it goes.

tormeh 11y ago
The C/C++ people aren't paranoid (JPL coders excepted). Otherwise they would be using something else. Ada users are paranoid and Java users are concerned about project cost.

eadz 11y ago

> Dynamic languages such as PHP, JS, Python and Ruby, in addition to being relatively poorly designed, are the languages that powered the explosion of the web The author seems to paint a broad brush in saying all dynamic languages are poorly designed. Languages can have different design goals. From Matz, Ruby's creator; > Instead of emphasizing the what, I want to emphasize the how part: how we feel while programming. That's Ruby's main difference from other language designs. I emphasize the feeling, in particular, how I feel using Ruby. ( http://www.artima.com/intv/rubyP.html http://www.artima.com/intv/rubyP.html ) So one of Ruby's primary design goals was programmer happiness, and in that respect it isn't not poorly designed at all. The technical 'perfection' of a programming language only matters to a point, it's us as programmers people that have to speak its language all day, and optimising for how we feel doing it is a valid design goal. I don't think it is a valid criticism to say something is poorly designed, without looking at its design goals. Every language is poorly designed in one way or another.

reacweb 11y ago

When I have started my carrier, it was unimaginable to use a dynamic language in a serious project. I was taught(!?) that the difference of development cost was very small. The mentalities have evolved. People know that you can drastically reduce the development costs (of small projects) by using dynamic languages. We know also that maintenance is more costly. Static languages are always improving to support features that used to exist only in dynamic languages. Dynamic languages evolve to support optional typing. The differences are reducing, but I think there is still a need for the 2 kind of languages. Often they are combined in big projects. For example c++/javascript in browser or c++/guile.

Thiz 11y ago

In academia and corporate? Sure. In real world? Php, Python, Ruby and Javascript still reign supreme. Mobile is another story since main platforms are controlled by corporations, but if it were for the hobbyists neither java nor swift would have had a chance.

onion2k 11y ago
It's worth noting that development workflow in small businesses and startups is rapidly shifting towards being more "corporate" though. Whereas a decade ago the tools necessary to write quality code needed a dedicated person to manage, now they can easily be set up and used in a few days by a single developer. That's going to drive the language of choice too - if used a typed language isn't going to be any harder than used a dynamic language then there's little reason to use a dynamic one.
galactus 11y ago
In what sense are academia and corporate not "the real world"?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - the_af 11y ago
    In what sense are there no innovative projects in academia? Of all the criticisms that could be made of academic research and projects, this one just doesn't make sense!

fulafel 11y ago

Another perspective is that dynamic application programming languages were always the underdogs. Corporate Cobol/Java/C#/C++ programmers always outnumbered application programmers in dynamic languages outside the ad-hoc web scripting languages (PHP & JS). Clojure & other Lisps, Python, Erlang, Lua, and Ruby are all application programming languages first and web languages only incidentally (1). They all have clear strengths and are miles away from the horror of JS and PHP. I think it shows in the article that the author's thinking on dynamic languages is colored by Javascript and its propensity to hide bugs. This is worrying since it might signal that JS does this for many people :( (1) Admittedly Ruby is more strongly associated with Web nowadays due to Rails.

chaotic-good 11y ago

No, they didn't. This article is narrow minded and prejudiced. Of cause if we're talking about programming in general - static typing languages are often a better option. But programming doesn't ends there, there is technical computing, statistical computing, data analysis and so on. How about beating Python + numpy + pandas in data crunching or maybe R in statistics? In this fields underlying data types is almost always very simple, and because of this you simply can't benefit much from static typing. This is not about expressiveness (the article author is wrong here IMO). It's all about flexibility and (more important) interactivity. I can do useful things in ipython console or in ipython notebook in the browser. It's like a tiny lab for small and moderately sized things, data munging, analysis and visualization, prototyping and all this stuff. There is dynamic languages like Python, R and even MATLAB that's not going to disappear anytime soon. There is a new dynamic language called Julia that's only starts getting traction but IMO it's already more interesting then Rust, Go and Nim combined together.

bostik 11y ago
> How about beating Python + numpy + pandas in data crunching I'd think this sentiment misses a small bit of context. In the above combination, Python is the glue language, which merely makes it easy to dispatch the heavy lifting. Numpy is a damn good convenience wrapper around the under-the-hood number crunching engines - which themselves are written in static languages. I mean, have you ever tried to _build_ numpy from scratch? That thing pulls in both BLAS and LAPACK, some of the most heavily optimised libraries in the world. These fortran(!) libraries can trace their ancestry all the way to 1970's, and have benefited from aggressive optimisations done over the course of 4 decades. [0,1] So, invoking numpy as a testament to power of dynamic languages misses a pretty important point. And I say that as someone who loves Python, and uses it as a first-choice tool in perhaps 90% of use cases. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Linear_Algebra_Subprograms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Linear_Algebra_Subprogra... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAPACK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAPACK
- Veedrac 11y ago
  > So, invoking numpy as a testament to power of dynamic languages misses a pretty important point. I don't think so. People build Numpy in a different language to the one they expose it in because those languages have different strengths. If Numpy's source languages (including BLAS and LAPACK) were suitable for front-end usage, Python would have never entered the equation. I think it's more a testament that despite the base libraries being so freely accessible, only dynamic languages have actually built front-ends that people want to use. Even Julia is dynamic.

programminggeek 11y ago

Short answer, no they haven't and they won't.

acbart 11y ago

I don't know, I'm taking a Program Analysis graduate seminar this semester, and my take is that the techniques for dynamic analysis are getting halfway decent. It's also interesting to compare Python and JavaScript. Holkner and Harland did a pair of papers about those two communities' usage of dynamic typing - JS people do type changes throughout the program execution, but after initialization the Python people follow the Aycock quote: "Giving people a dynamically-typed language does not mean that they write dynamically-typed programs." Languages have different characteristic programs, to some degree.

johngossman 11y ago

It might be an interesting contest to find the earliest reference to this debate. It isn't quite what I was looking for, but I found this short comparison of programming languages from 1972 amusing: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19720025540.pdf http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1972002... For example, this quote from the conclusion: "The possibility of standardization of computer languages is still remote, and in the author's opinion will remain so until standardization in hardware applied to standard problems is first achieved" Are we there yet?

mcv 11y ago

Static Languages won? That's not just a bit premature; it's bizarre. Several of the most popular and effective languages at the moment are dynamic: Python, Javascript, Ruby, PHP, all the LISP derivatives. I don't doubt that lots of new static languages have popped up, but how many people actually use those? Plenty of people use static languages, true, but those are mostly the old ones: Java, C, C++, C#, and Haskell and Scala. Any claim that this has been settled by some new languages nobody is using is bizarre.

dasboth 11y ago

Sweeping statements like "X programming language/paradigm has won" do an injustice to the wealth of uses of programming. You wouldn't use the same programming language to write code for an Arduino, a startup MVP web application, an enterprise desktop application etc. and there's no reason you should. Personally I developed most of my web apps in C# but I find Python great for prototyping and data analysis tasks. Why is there a need to declare a winner?

random_coder 11y ago

Availability of an interpreter has been one of the major advantages of programming in dynamic languages. With languages like Haskell, Scala coming with first class interpreters, this advantage is being lost to a certain extent. I think it should be possible to build interpreters even for mainstream static langs like C++ and Java, they probably exist already, though I'm not sure why they haven't found larger acceptance. I believe the biggest advantage with a good static type system is that programmers can design good datatypes and specify their relationships - and the compiler can then detect any inconsistencies(ideally anyway).

brianwawok 11y ago
Java take too much boilerplate. Who wants to use it in an interpeter? I do use a interpreter with both scala and python a lot.

hawski 11y ago

Article points to http://wtfjs.com/ http://wtfjs.com/ to show "glaring flaws" of JS. JavaScript is not perfect, but almost all what is presented on sites similar to wtfjs.com are non-issues to me. It may be stupid or surprising that API behaves in some ways, but as long as it behaves exactly as in documentation it is not much of a problem. I always check available documentation even for basic APIs in every language that I use. i.e. I was amazed that even senior developers at my previous job did not know that strncpy is practically useless. It was just `man strncpy` away. In a way static typing can save you just like reading of documentation, but in a more organized manner. That said you should still eat your ve^W^W^W read documentation. What helps in case of dynamic languages is REPL. It is even better than documentation sometimes. You can easly check every line with your reasoning. For C or C++ I always have some simple file for testing basic constructs to check my assumptions. One could argue that that is the role of unit tests, but one does not prevent the other. Unit tests are same thing, but in more organized manner.

gnuvince 11y ago
Two things: a) Maxime works on a compiler for JS, so even if something is documented to death, it usually makes analyses less precise and/or more complex. b) Many statically-typed languages have a REPL (OCaml, Haskell, Scala); this is not an issue with the typing discipline, but with the tools available to the developers.
- dllthomas 11y ago
  With type inference, a REPL can even tell you things about code that can't run yet! Prelude> :t mapM undefined [5,6,7] mapM undefined [5,6,7] :: Monad m => m [b] This can get even more informative with Typed Holes: Prelude> mapM _whatFunc [5,6,7] <interactive>:14:6: Found hole ‘_whatFunc’ with type: Integer -> m b Where: ‘m’ is a rigid type variable bound by the inferred type of it :: m [b] at <interactive>:14:1 ‘b’ is a rigid type variable bound by the inferred type of it :: m [b] at <interactive>:14:1 Relevant bindings include it :: m [b] (bound at <interactive>:14:1) In the first argument of ‘mapM’, namely ‘_whatFunc’ In the expression: mapM _whatFunc [5, 6, 7] In an equation for ‘it’: it = mapM _whatFunc [5, 6, 7]

wmil 11y ago

Static languages haven't "won". There's just not much point in creating a new dynamic language. Ruby is flexible enough to turn into a DSL for whatever. Python does it's job very well. Lua has it's niche. Javascript is everywhere now. What can a new dynamic language do that isn't easier to accomplish with libraries? So most of the language development has gone towards making static typing easier to use. Improving on C++ / Java is easy. There are interesting ways to go about it with no clear right answer.

dugword 11y ago

"Dynamic languages are at a disadvantage. Most of the mainstream ones out there today were designed by amateurs, people with no formal CS background" Patently false. * from Wikipedia Python: Guido van Rossum * Master's degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Amsterdam * Recognized as a Distinguished Engineer by the Association for Computing Machinery Ruby: Yukihiro Matsumoto * Graduated with an information science degree from University of Tsukuba, where he was a member of Ikuo Nakata's research lab on programming languages and compilers JavaScript: Brendan Eich * Brendan Eich received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science at Santa Clara University. He received his master's degree in 1985 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Perl: Larry Wall .... Well I guess he doesn't have a formal CS background. But he was literally a NASA rocket scientist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#cite_ref-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#cite_ref-3

rbehrends 11y ago
You can also add: Lua: Roberto Ierusalimschy * Associate professor at PUC-Rio. Tcl: John Ousterhout * Professor of computer science at Stanford (and professor of computer science at Berkeley when he invented Tcl). Plus, Python's design was based on a teaching language (ABC) that was designed based on actual usability research. And, of course, this does not even count the classics (LISP, Smalltalk, Scheme) whose authors have pretty impressive academic pedigrees and whose designs inspired many of the more recent languages (e.g., the influences of Smalltalk and LISP on Ruby are pretty obvious).
vorg 11y ago
> Dynamic languages such as PHP, JS, Python and Ruby Don't forget the other dynamic language frequently mentioned in the article... PHP: Rasmus Lerdorf graduated in 1993 from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor of Applied Science in Systems Design Engineering. But perhaps the author's definition of "mainstream" includes languages of Groovy's degree of adoption.