3 ms·

I think the trend is more of a pendulum swinging back and forth than a single cycle of "static" => "dynamic" => "oh, dynamic was bad, so static" explanation. Pr

I think the trend is more of a pendulum swinging back and forth than a single cycle of "static" => "dynamic" => "oh, dynamic was bad, so static" explanation. Prolog, Smalltalk, Lisp, etc. are likely older than most of the engineers now very enthusiastic about static typing. Static typing is fashionable right now, I suspect, because it's the first time many engineers are stumbling upon it via Typescript, Sorbet, Haskell (or Haskell-derived projects like Elm). I predict eventually the costs (and let's be honest: static typing is not free) are realized, there will be a re-emergence of dynamic typing being fashionable again in the next 10 years.

StevePerkins 5y ago
Popular music changes every 5 or so years, because freshmen entering high school want their own identity that's distinct from the seniors who just graduated. This is why they can reject the music wave that came just before, yet also embrace nostalgia for the prior wave that came before that. That's fine, because the previous wave of kids (from which we want a separate identity) weren't into that wave. This teenage dynamic carries over into adulthood. Academia is a bunch of young adults chasing tenure, by publishing papers arguing that the existing batch of tenured professors are washed up and got it all wrong. And also "rediscovering" the older research that was discarded by the previous generation. Software development is a bunch of a junior devs working on bug tickets. Frustrated by the tech debt they inherited, and convinced that tech debt comes from the tech rather from the organization. It's just that in comparison to academia, technology has the generational lifespan of fruit flies. So we spin through the cycle a lot faster than other walks of life.
friedman23 5y ago
Static typing is net 0 cost. We don't need to be "honest" static typing is obviously not free you need to think of types. The real revelation was that the cost of dynamic languages far exceeds the cost of a statically typed language.
- bb88 5y ago
  You're not wrong, but yet you are. There were failures with Ada as well as I recall. Statically typed. Ahead of it's time. But in some critical use cases, it failed. It also cost a lot to maintain. Compilers/IDE's were super expensive. Yet there were cases of undefined behavior that you still had to (hopefully) catch in a peer review. This was the case of the Arianne 5 rocket explosion caused by software written in statically typed Ada. It's worth a read through: https://itsfoss.com/a-floating-point-error-that-caused-a-damage-worth-half-a-billion/ https://itsfoss.com/a-floating-point-error-that-caused-a-dam... Java and the log4j mess are similar. It's a statically typed language, but a poorly reviewed code base. The static typing didn't catch the security hole. And it's cost the US millions of dollars so far to fix it. Static typing may be nice and all, but it sure as hell ain't a silver bullet.
  - friedman23 5y ago
    >Java and the log4j mess are similar. It's a statically typed language, but a poorly reviewed code base. The static typing didn't catch the security hole. And it's cost the US millions of dollars so far to fix it. This is a ridiculous statement and just really devalues everything you are saying. How is a vulnerability in a library that is completely orthogonal to typing relevant in this discussion. Static typing never claimed to cure programmer stupidity. Also when I say static typing I mean languages with good type systems, as much as people like to say typescript is bad because it's based on javascript, at least null errors are impossible if you are using strict mode unlike Java and Go where any variable could potentially be null and the compiler wont tell you if you have unhandled null cases.
    - bb88 5y ago
      You said: > Static typing is net 0 cost. We don't need to be "honest" static typing is obviously not free you need to think of types. The real revelation was that the cost of dynamic languages far exceeds the cost of a statically typed language. And my point is the static typed languages we do have didn't save us anything in terms of cost. I recommend maybe you read the hackernews posting guidelines before you post again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

StevePerkins 5y ago

Popular music changes every 5 or so years, because freshmen entering high school want their own identity that's distinct from the seniors who just graduated. This is why they can reject the music wave that came just before, yet also embrace nostalgia for the prior wave that came before that. That's fine, because the previous wave of kids (from which we want a separate identity) weren't into that wave. This teenage dynamic carries over into adulthood. Academia is a bunch of young adults chasing tenure, by publishing papers arguing that the existing batch of tenured professors are washed up and got it all wrong. And also "rediscovering" the older research that was discarded by the previous generation. Software development is a bunch of a junior devs working on bug tickets. Frustrated by the tech debt they inherited, and convinced that tech debt comes from the tech rather from the organization. It's just that in comparison to academia, technology has the generational lifespan of fruit flies. So we spin through the cycle a lot faster than other walks of life.

friedman23 5y ago

Static typing is net 0 cost. We don't need to be "honest" static typing is obviously not free you need to think of types. The real revelation was that the cost of dynamic languages far exceeds the cost of a statically typed language.

bb88 5y ago
You're not wrong, but yet you are. There were failures with Ada as well as I recall. Statically typed. Ahead of it's time. But in some critical use cases, it failed. It also cost a lot to maintain. Compilers/IDE's were super expensive. Yet there were cases of undefined behavior that you still had to (hopefully) catch in a peer review. This was the case of the Arianne 5 rocket explosion caused by software written in statically typed Ada. It's worth a read through: https://itsfoss.com/a-floating-point-error-that-caused-a-damage-worth-half-a-billion/ https://itsfoss.com/a-floating-point-error-that-caused-a-dam... Java and the log4j mess are similar. It's a statically typed language, but a poorly reviewed code base. The static typing didn't catch the security hole. And it's cost the US millions of dollars so far to fix it. Static typing may be nice and all, but it sure as hell ain't a silver bullet.
- friedman23 5y ago
  >Java and the log4j mess are similar. It's a statically typed language, but a poorly reviewed code base. The static typing didn't catch the security hole. And it's cost the US millions of dollars so far to fix it. This is a ridiculous statement and just really devalues everything you are saying. How is a vulnerability in a library that is completely orthogonal to typing relevant in this discussion. Static typing never claimed to cure programmer stupidity. Also when I say static typing I mean languages with good type systems, as much as people like to say typescript is bad because it's based on javascript, at least null errors are impossible if you are using strict mode unlike Java and Go where any variable could potentially be null and the compiler wont tell you if you have unhandled null cases.
  - bb88 5y ago
    You said: > Static typing is net 0 cost. We don't need to be "honest" static typing is obviously not free you need to think of types. The real revelation was that the cost of dynamic languages far exceeds the cost of a statically typed language. And my point is the static typed languages we do have didn't save us anything in terms of cost. I recommend maybe you read the hackernews posting guidelines before you post again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html