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In the 20th century we were big on static typing too. My first serious programming was in Pascal, in the 1980s. You have to understand that trends in programmin

In the 20th century we were big on static typing too. My first serious programming was in Pascal, in the 1980s. You have to understand that trends in programming are like clothing fashion, not like progress. My first Pascal was Apple Pascal, which was a UCSD Pascal. In UCSD Pascal everything was compiled to a virtual machine called the p-machine. In the late 1980s we all thought this was a stupid idea and for efficiency we should use native code. But by the late 1990s things went back to the idea of virtual machines, JVM and .NET. Now with Go and Rust we seem to be going back to native code. And with this whole obsession about static typing we are going back to the 1980s too.

hota_mazi 10y ago
> In the 20th century we were big on static typing too. I don't think we were. I don't even think we truly understood the practical difference between statically and dynamically typed languages. But even so, back then, it was reasonable to claim that while statically typed languages have the advantage of performance and correctness, they are much more verbose than dynamically typed languages. Today, this is no longer true. We know how to design languages that have the strengths of both statically and dynamically typed languages (see Kotlin and Swift for the best incarnations of these concepts). There is really no good argument in favor of picking a dynamically typed language.
Safety1stClyde 10y ago
> You have to understand that trends in programming are like clothing fashion, not like progress. Yes, it is all just fashion, and relentless churning.