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I am beginning to suspect that Java is almost singlehandedly responsible for the prevailing opinion that static typing doesn't do anything useful and mostly get

I am beginning to suspect that Java is almost singlehandedly responsible for the prevailing opinion that static typing doesn't do anything useful and mostly gets in the way. Which is sad, because I'm also hard-pressed to think of a worse poster child for static typing than Java. It's like a stereotypical bureaucrat, asking you to fill out a mountain of paperwork before it can proceed to do a whole lot of nothing useful. There is better out there. Sadly, for the longest time, the best examples didn't receive much interest outside of academia, on account of languages like Java being so entrenched. But it is worth spending some time with a member of the ML family to get a taste of what static typing could have been like.

Karrot_Kream 8y ago
Really? There's a ton of boilerplate in Haskell that goes into working around the type system (to the point where people have made alternate Preludes to avoid having to explicitly specify the goop), and I can't count the number of times I've had to massage types in Scala for no other reason than to push a class into a certain cats monad. Lets not get started on error types in Rust. I'm a fan of static typing, but let's stop this incessant drumbeat of propaganda saying that typing is free, and the pain comes from no-true-scotsman implementations.
apta 8y ago
> of a worse poster child for static typing than Java. C, golang