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> It's just that dynamic languages outcompeted them. All "trending" languages are statically typed (Rust, Go, Swift, Kotlin, ...) and all the popular JavaScrip

by dom0 9y ago

> It's just that dynamic languages outcompeted them. All "trending" languages are statically typed (Rust, Go, Swift, Kotlin, ...) and all the popular JavaScrip-improved-languages are statically typed as well. Even further, many dynamically typed languages have pushed in recent years to add type annotations or even static typing (e.g. mypy). Dynamic typing is the brainchild of the 90s for rapid initial development. Sustainability has been a big issue from the outset.

kazinator 9y ago
Dynamic typing is from 1958 Lisp. Your history is off a bit there, by some forty years.
- dom0 9y ago
  Lisp has nothing to do (in many ways) with the late 80s and 90s wave of dynamic languages.
  - spot 9y ago
    JavaScript was definitely partly inspired by Scheme.
    - zem 9y ago
      likewise ruby by lisp
      - Gaelan 9y ago
        I’d say Ruby’s closest sibling is Smalltalk personally.
        kazinator 9y ago
        People say this mainly because of the brace-enclosed blocks of code being functions. However, that is really just a syntactic sugar for lambda (and can even have explicit arguments: (lambda (x y) ...) <--> {|x,y| ... }.
        zem 9y ago
        there's the "everything is objects and messages sent to them" bit too, which is definitely from smalltalk. ruby took the good bits from several languages.
- vorg 9y ago
  The 90's also saw much commercial experimentation with visual environments (e.g. Visual Basic, Delphi, JBuilder) with round-trip conversion between the layout form and underlying code. They were promoted for R.A.D. (rapid application development -- remember that acronym?) but, like dynamically typed languages, they also had sustainability issues. Of course, like dynamic typing and Lisp, visual environments also had Smalltalk from way back, but they were before big business became infatuated with the ideas.
  - TimJYoung 9y ago
    How do products like Delphi have sustainability (maintainability ?) issues ? Delphi/Object Pascal is statically-typed, so you can't even build an application that has issues with the code-behind for a form. You can see errors at run-time from mismatches between the code-behind and the forms, but this has nothing to do with the language. It's just the way that certain products like Delphi decided to handle such mismatches. You'll see these types of issues with any code that performs run-time serialization/deserialization of class instances. Our product, Elevate Web Builder, uses a similar architecture with its WYSIWYG form designer/forms (they use JSON instead of a custom key-value format), but it simply ignores properties in forms that don't exist in the actual code.
bayesian_horse 9y ago
I've still not seen a single "sustainability issue" in Python code bases which seem to stem from dynamic typing as opposed to static typing.
christophilus 9y ago
I think Elixir is trending, and it's not statically typed, right? That said, I do agree that static typing is in vogue.

by dom0 9y ago

kazinator 9y ago

Dynamic typing is from 1958 Lisp. Your history is off a bit there, by some forty years.

dom0 9y ago
Lisp has nothing to do (in many ways) with the late 80s and 90s wave of dynamic languages.
- spot 9y ago
  JavaScript was definitely partly inspired by Scheme.
  - zem 9y ago
    likewise ruby by lisp
    - Gaelan 9y ago
      I’d say Ruby’s closest sibling is Smalltalk personally.
      - kazinator 9y ago
        People say this mainly because of the brace-enclosed blocks of code being functions. However, that is really just a syntactic sugar for lambda (and can even have explicit arguments: (lambda (x y) ...) <--> {|x,y| ... }.
        zem 9y ago
        there's the "everything is objects and messages sent to them" bit too, which is definitely from smalltalk. ruby took the good bits from several languages.
vorg 9y ago
The 90's also saw much commercial experimentation with visual environments (e.g. Visual Basic, Delphi, JBuilder) with round-trip conversion between the layout form and underlying code. They were promoted for R.A.D. (rapid application development -- remember that acronym?) but, like dynamically typed languages, they also had sustainability issues. Of course, like dynamic typing and Lisp, visual environments also had Smalltalk from way back, but they were before big business became infatuated with the ideas.
- TimJYoung 9y ago
  How do products like Delphi have sustainability (maintainability ?) issues ? Delphi/Object Pascal is statically-typed, so you can't even build an application that has issues with the code-behind for a form. You can see errors at run-time from mismatches between the code-behind and the forms, but this has nothing to do with the language. It's just the way that certain products like Delphi decided to handle such mismatches. You'll see these types of issues with any code that performs run-time serialization/deserialization of class instances. Our product, Elevate Web Builder, uses a similar architecture with its WYSIWYG form designer/forms (they use JSON instead of a custom key-value format), but it simply ignores properties in forms that don't exist in the actual code.

bayesian_horse 9y ago

I've still not seen a single "sustainability issue" in Python code bases which seem to stem from dynamic typing as opposed to static typing.

christophilus 9y ago

I think Elixir is trending, and it's not statically typed, right? That said, I do agree that static typing is in vogue.