I think we're not seeing eye-to-eye on the HCI part here. The value of talking to programmers in the field is just to understand what are the most difficult pro

I think we're not seeing eye-to-eye on the HCI part here. The value of talking to programmers in the field is just to understand what are the most difficult problems they face day-to-day. You don't have to ask them how to solve it, but just getting that initial feedback is invaluable in understanding whether a proposed research direction is likely to have an impact. This may require some ingenuity on behalf of the researcher to tease out underlying causes from symptoms, e.g. if a user says "my problem is that my code breaks all the time," is that because their debugging tools suck, because they need a better type system, etc., but at least you're grounded in reality. Your vision for the future seems to be focused a lot on a strong type system, which is a reasonable bet. A lot of the people in the PL community share this view. But why? Do we _really_ need the additional benefits on top of existing type systems? Personally, I'm not yet convinced. I think helping people transition from untyped to typed code is a more important problem than building ever more complex type systems, since it's a problem people have much more frequently in the real world. Not only that, but _they will continue to have it_ for the foreseeable future, since transitioning from dynamic to static typing is a natural and inherent part of the programming process (which is also why I disagree that dynamic languages will become a niche). But either way, both these views are still mostly based on our personal experiences. I don't think either of us can strongly claim that pursuing gradually typed or dependently typed languages is more important until we can accurately characterize the needs of programmers in the large.