4 ms·

Yes that’s why everybody collectively moved on to static types exclusively 30 years ago and we all lived happily ever after because there was never a point wher

by phyrex 4y ago

Yes that’s why everybody collectively moved on to static types exclusively 30 years ago and we all lived happily ever after because there was never a point where dynamic typing made more sense or was anything but inferior. The end.

Gigachad 4y ago
My theory is that types were the baby thrown out with the bathwater. Dynamic languages changed a whole lot more than just types. The older typed languages were a huge pain to work with, dynamic languages fixed a lot of that and added standard libraries that do a huge amount of work for you. Now TypeScript and Rust are showing typed languages can be just as productive, if not more productive than Ruby/Python/JS.
- phyrex 4y ago
  I don’t buy it. Static languages have certainly become more ergonomic, but if the evidence was really so overwhelmingly clear, everybody would have switched by now. To wit, regarding your comment about Rust, I just read this article earlier today: https://mdwdotla.medium.com/using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautionary-tale-42ab823d9454 https://mdwdotla.medium.com/using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautio...
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Just about everyone has switched from JS to TS. When given the choice of the exact same language with and without types, it seems pretty clear that typed languages win.
    - gregors 4y ago
      >>> Just about everyone has switched from JS to TS You are mistaken. While TS is popular it's nowhere near as popular as JS. In fact, just looking at online community counts, I'd say it's 1/2 as popular. Will it continue to gain? I'll never bet against JS.
    - phyrex 4y ago
      I don’t think that’s correct and you’re reading too much into popular blog posts (“we tried typescript and decided it wasn’t for us” doesn’t make for a good article). I don’t have any hard data either, but since we’re swapping anecdotes it’s my impression that typed pythons uptake has been very meh outside of multi-million line codebases (and is basically not seen in ML work!), and typed racket and typed clojure are basically unused in practice
  - lmm 4y ago
    > Static languages have certainly become more ergonomic, but if the evidence was really so overwhelmingly clear, everybody would have switched by now. Change happens slowly in our industry, but Ruby very much feels in decline. More telling IMO is that every major new language to emerge this millennium has been typed.
    - cutler 4y ago
      Clojure and Elixir are dynamically typed as are the two most popular languages - JS and Python.
      - eropple 4y ago
        TypeScript seems to have by-and-large "won" in the JavaScript ecosystem; I can think of exactly one senior+ developer I've run into in the last few years who's expressed a preference for JS over TS and, similarly, I can think of only one greenfield purely-JavaScript project I've seen started in the last three years; that project was built in that way largely out of ideological objection to having a build pipeline. (I think it was a mistake.) It isn't a majority yet, but it seems inevitable that the future of JavaScript among non-laggard populations is TypeScript or whatever will supplant it--and whatever will supplant it will not discard types. As for Python, adoption is slower, but for me at least, Python typings are becoming the reason to consider using Python in 2022 and I won't use a library without them. And the worst part of Elixir, from where I stand, is that typespecs are bitterly underused. I have some hopes for something like Gleam to make a backwards impact upon Elixir, because my experience with development teams trying to bang on Elixir services without it is pretty grim.
        weatherlite 4y ago
        Typescript won huh? You're using your own anecdotal experience to support your statement. I'm looking at random Javascript questions on Stackoverflow now - there's a gaziilion of them from the last hour. None of them is Typescript. So plenty of people still write JS. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/javascript https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/javascript I use Typescript and like it btw but I just don't agree with you here...
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Problem is switching programming languages is a big deal. It is a big bet to take. Static typing is probably not enough of an advantage alone but has to be taken into consideration with all the other tradeoffs.
- cutler 4y ago
  By what measure of "productive"? If you mean developer productivity Rust is, by the admission of its own community, the slowest development environment. Rust is great where memory safety is paramount but it doesn't compete in the same playing field as Rails for CRUD apps.
  - norman784 4y ago
    I would say that with Rust you can be "more" productive by deploying apps that requires less maintenance as for example Ruby or JS app, also a pain with JS/Ruby is updating dependencies, that's a very scary thing to do if you are far behind, while with Rust you can update and instantly see where your code broke. But I do agree that with Rails you can have quickly a more functional app, but that will be sooner or later not true anymore.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Can C# enter the chat? “I have been pretty good all along”. F# too! I admit C# suffers from the OO fetish roots, but it has pretty nice language features now so I almost never need to use inheritance.

by phyrex 4y ago

Gigachad 4y ago

My theory is that types were the baby thrown out with the bathwater. Dynamic languages changed a whole lot more than just types. The older typed languages were a huge pain to work with, dynamic languages fixed a lot of that and added standard libraries that do a huge amount of work for you. Now TypeScript and Rust are showing typed languages can be just as productive, if not more productive than Ruby/Python/JS.

phyrex 4y ago
I don’t buy it. Static languages have certainly become more ergonomic, but if the evidence was really so overwhelmingly clear, everybody would have switched by now. To wit, regarding your comment about Rust, I just read this article earlier today: https://mdwdotla.medium.com/using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautionary-tale-42ab823d9454 https://mdwdotla.medium.com/using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautio...
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Just about everyone has switched from JS to TS. When given the choice of the exact same language with and without types, it seems pretty clear that typed languages win.
  - gregors 4y ago
    >>> Just about everyone has switched from JS to TS You are mistaken. While TS is popular it's nowhere near as popular as JS. In fact, just looking at online community counts, I'd say it's 1/2 as popular. Will it continue to gain? I'll never bet against JS.
  - phyrex 4y ago
    I don’t think that’s correct and you’re reading too much into popular blog posts (“we tried typescript and decided it wasn’t for us” doesn’t make for a good article). I don’t have any hard data either, but since we’re swapping anecdotes it’s my impression that typed pythons uptake has been very meh outside of multi-million line codebases (and is basically not seen in ML work!), and typed racket and typed clojure are basically unused in practice
- lmm 4y ago
  > Static languages have certainly become more ergonomic, but if the evidence was really so overwhelmingly clear, everybody would have switched by now. Change happens slowly in our industry, but Ruby very much feels in decline. More telling IMO is that every major new language to emerge this millennium has been typed.
  - cutler 4y ago
    Clojure and Elixir are dynamically typed as are the two most popular languages - JS and Python.
    - eropple 4y ago
      TypeScript seems to have by-and-large "won" in the JavaScript ecosystem; I can think of exactly one senior+ developer I've run into in the last few years who's expressed a preference for JS over TS and, similarly, I can think of only one greenfield purely-JavaScript project I've seen started in the last three years; that project was built in that way largely out of ideological objection to having a build pipeline. (I think it was a mistake.) It isn't a majority yet, but it seems inevitable that the future of JavaScript among non-laggard populations is TypeScript or whatever will supplant it--and whatever will supplant it will not discard types. As for Python, adoption is slower, but for me at least, Python typings are becoming the reason to consider using Python in 2022 and I won't use a library without them. And the worst part of Elixir, from where I stand, is that typespecs are bitterly underused. I have some hopes for something like Gleam to make a backwards impact upon Elixir, because my experience with development teams trying to bang on Elixir services without it is pretty grim.
      - weatherlite 4y ago
        Typescript won huh? You're using your own anecdotal experience to support your statement. I'm looking at random Javascript questions on Stackoverflow now - there's a gaziilion of them from the last hour. None of them is Typescript. So plenty of people still write JS. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/javascript https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/javascript I use Typescript and like it btw but I just don't agree with you here...
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Problem is switching programming languages is a big deal. It is a big bet to take. Static typing is probably not enough of an advantage alone but has to be taken into consideration with all the other tradeoffs.
cutler 4y ago
By what measure of "productive"? If you mean developer productivity Rust is, by the admission of its own community, the slowest development environment. Rust is great where memory safety is paramount but it doesn't compete in the same playing field as Rails for CRUD apps.
- norman784 4y ago
  I would say that with Rust you can be "more" productive by deploying apps that requires less maintenance as for example Ruby or JS app, also a pain with JS/Ruby is updating dependencies, that's a very scary thing to do if you are far behind, while with Rust you can update and instantly see where your code broke. But I do agree that with Rails you can have quickly a more functional app, but that will be sooner or later not true anymore.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Can C# enter the chat? “I have been pretty good all along”. F# too! I admit C# suffers from the OO fetish roots, but it has pretty nice language features now so I almost never need to use inheritance.