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What are the costs of statically typed languages? The author stated "thinking about the correct types" and "increases compile times" among some other, weaker (i

What are the costs of statically typed languages? The author stated "thinking about the correct types" and "increases compile times" among some other, weaker (imo) costs. What is wrong with "thinking about the correct types"? You are thinking about the same things in a dynamic language, right? For example, say you need to know about things that are "thennable". Weather you are in a statically typed language or not, you are still checking for the same thing: does it have the then() method? The tradeoff is in reading vs implementing code. With a statically typed language, you can easily search for implementers of the Thennable interface and you are guaranteed to be show every implementer. The downside is that you have to write a few more lines of code to satisfy the static typing. With a dynamically typed language, you have to find the implementers yourself, but you can just slap a then method on anything and it will work. I am biased toward static typing so I am interested to hear counter points.

hellofunk 9y ago
One very simple and significant cost is developer time. It simply takes less time to write code in a dynamically-typed language. You don't have a compiler to please, you don't write extra code to massage types, annotate types, etc, and most dynamically typed languages are pretty elegant (i.e. Clojure), where you can pack a lot of punch in just a few characters. So the trade off is: static typing gives you more compile-time certainty, but at a cost of spending more time developing your code. Dynamic typing gets you to a working product or prototype typically much much faster, but with added run-time debugging. Each has its benefits and costs. In my experience, there is no doubt that dynamically typed languages are faster-to-production than statically-typed. This doesn't mean that I don't admire static typing, though, because most developers appreciate some degree of purity in their work.

hellofunk 9y ago

One very simple and significant cost is developer time. It simply takes less time to write code in a dynamically-typed language. You don't have a compiler to please, you don't write extra code to massage types, annotate types, etc, and most dynamically typed languages are pretty elegant (i.e. Clojure), where you can pack a lot of punch in just a few characters. So the trade off is: static typing gives you more compile-time certainty, but at a cost of spending more time developing your code. Dynamic typing gets you to a working product or prototype typically much much faster, but with added run-time debugging. Each has its benefits and costs. In my experience, there is no doubt that dynamically typed languages are faster-to-production than statically-typed. This doesn't mean that I don't admire static typing, though, because most developers appreciate some degree of purity in their work.