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No, it's one of the fastest ways in software development you can ship software features to the customer. Scripting language, dynamic typing, microservices and

No, it's one of the fastest ways in software development you can ship software features to the customer. Scripting language, dynamic typing, microservices and a message queue is shockingly effective. There is no way to compete with that if you are using traditional development techniques. It's why we watch videos online on Youtube and not Google videos. The Google developers got beaten up by the much smaller group of Youtube Python developers. To be honest, I find it shocking that the average user on hacker news doesn't know that software development using dynamic typing is considerably faster than software development using static typing.

synthc 4y ago
Having used both statically and dynamically typed languages, I don't think this is true at all. Most modern languages are pretty close in productivity, architecture and the way a company is organized have much more impact on productivity. In big enterprises every small change requires 3 meetings, in a startup you can just make the change.
- ReflectedImage 4y ago
  There are studies that show it is true: https://games.greggman.com/game/dynamic-typing-static-typing/ https://games.greggman.com/game/dynamic-typing-static-typing...
  - synthc 4y ago
    Based on one guy who did a hobby research project based on GitHub issues?
    - ReflectedImage 4y ago
      Have you ever of this little company called Youtube? Youtube did the dynamic typing thing in Python with 20 developers and Google did the static typing thing with several hundred developers in C++ for their Google Videos. Who do you think won? https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=eulODwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA136&dq=google+video+vs+youtube+python+story&pg=PA136&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=google%20video%20vs%20youtube%20python%20story&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=eulODwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA136&d...
      - synthc 4y ago
        Nice anecdote, but was it because of the language or because a small motivated team gets much more done than a big enterprise that is bogged down in meetings?
        hbrn 4y ago
        You seem to be quite close-minded, every piece of evidence is not good enough. Are you only going be satisfied by a 20-year long peer-reviewed independent study? How about this: Python is only ~1.5 times more popular than Java, and Ruby is way below Java, and yet if you look top successful YC startups, Python has 17% of valuation, Ruby has 52% and Java is merely 1%. You can, of course, choose to interpret it in a multitude of ways, but at least one of them is that if you pick Java for your startup, you are unlikely to be successful (or, alternatively, people who are unlikely to build a successful startup are more likely to choose Java). https://charliereese.ca/y-combinator-top-50-software-startups/ https://charliereese.ca/y-combinator-top-50-software-startup...
dkarl 4y ago
As of 2005/2006, you'd be right. Nowadays, the speed of development for statically typed languages is much faster, thanks to improvements in tooling. Going further, if you choose a modern language that supports type inference, static typing becomes a pure win, and in my opinion, there's no longer any good reason to use something like Python on the back end. If I had to pick a language for the situation you're describing, I might pick something like Kotlin. My background for context: in 2000-2009 or so I wrote a lot of C++ and often wrote Python bindings using Boost::Python because of how much quicker and more convenient Python was for scripting and exploratory work. I also wrote a lot of Java in that era, and Java was indeed incredibly verbose and ugly. Like C++, it imposed heavy costs for the benefits it gave you. After 2010 I worked mostly in Scala, and for a year now I've been working primarily in Python. The simplicity of working in Python still feels liberating, and doing Pandas work in Jupyter is great fun, but in most ways it feels like a relic to me now, because I can write code that looks almost as simple and reads just as easily in Scala as Python. (Sadly, I wouldn't recommend picking Scala for a tech stack in a business, because it's hard to find Scala developers who want to write stupid simple code.)
- hbrn 4y ago
  > Nowadays, the speed of development for statically typed languages is much faster, thanks to improvements in tooling What you static camp guys don't seem to understand is that tooling is not that important, it's just a minor multiplicator that caps out pretty fast. You can't turn nurse into a surgeon by giving her a sharper scalpel. Most engineers that had Java background I interacted with had a tendency to over-engineer. It's not because they had bad tools, it's because Java has a culture of over-engineering, which they soaked in and embraced. Tools & language are getting better - that's great. But that does not automatically fix the culture, which might take another decade or two. "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." At this point, Java is like BASIC. You can fix the language all you want, but you also need to fix the culture. It's not going to happen while most people won't even admit there is a problem. There's a reason Zen of Java is a joke: https://medium.com/@ratherabstract/the-zen-of-java-edd99991f8f8 https://medium.com/@ratherabstract/the-zen-of-java-edd99991f...

synthc 4y ago

Having used both statically and dynamically typed languages, I don't think this is true at all. Most modern languages are pretty close in productivity, architecture and the way a company is organized have much more impact on productivity. In big enterprises every small change requires 3 meetings, in a startup you can just make the change.

ReflectedImage 4y ago
There are studies that show it is true: https://games.greggman.com/game/dynamic-typing-static-typing/ https://games.greggman.com/game/dynamic-typing-static-typing...
- synthc 4y ago
  Based on one guy who did a hobby research project based on GitHub issues?
  - ReflectedImage 4y ago
    Have you ever of this little company called Youtube? Youtube did the dynamic typing thing in Python with 20 developers and Google did the static typing thing with several hundred developers in C++ for their Google Videos. Who do you think won? https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=eulODwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA136&dq=google+video+vs+youtube+python+story&pg=PA136&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=google%20video%20vs%20youtube%20python%20story&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=eulODwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA136&d...
    - synthc 4y ago
      Nice anecdote, but was it because of the language or because a small motivated team gets much more done than a big enterprise that is bogged down in meetings?
      - hbrn 4y ago
        You seem to be quite close-minded, every piece of evidence is not good enough. Are you only going be satisfied by a 20-year long peer-reviewed independent study? How about this: Python is only ~1.5 times more popular than Java, and Ruby is way below Java, and yet if you look top successful YC startups, Python has 17% of valuation, Ruby has 52% and Java is merely 1%. You can, of course, choose to interpret it in a multitude of ways, but at least one of them is that if you pick Java for your startup, you are unlikely to be successful (or, alternatively, people who are unlikely to build a successful startup are more likely to choose Java). https://charliereese.ca/y-combinator-top-50-software-startups/ https://charliereese.ca/y-combinator-top-50-software-startup...

dkarl 4y ago

As of 2005/2006, you'd be right. Nowadays, the speed of development for statically typed languages is much faster, thanks to improvements in tooling. Going further, if you choose a modern language that supports type inference, static typing becomes a pure win, and in my opinion, there's no longer any good reason to use something like Python on the back end. If I had to pick a language for the situation you're describing, I might pick something like Kotlin. My background for context: in 2000-2009 or so I wrote a lot of C++ and often wrote Python bindings using Boost::Python because of how much quicker and more convenient Python was for scripting and exploratory work. I also wrote a lot of Java in that era, and Java was indeed incredibly verbose and ugly. Like C++, it imposed heavy costs for the benefits it gave you. After 2010 I worked mostly in Scala, and for a year now I've been working primarily in Python. The simplicity of working in Python still feels liberating, and doing Pandas work in Jupyter is great fun, but in most ways it feels like a relic to me now, because I can write code that looks almost as simple and reads just as easily in Scala as Python. (Sadly, I wouldn't recommend picking Scala for a tech stack in a business, because it's hard to find Scala developers who want to write stupid simple code.)

hbrn 4y ago
> Nowadays, the speed of development for statically typed languages is much faster, thanks to improvements in tooling What you static camp guys don't seem to understand is that tooling is not that important, it's just a minor multiplicator that caps out pretty fast. You can't turn nurse into a surgeon by giving her a sharper scalpel. Most engineers that had Java background I interacted with had a tendency to over-engineer. It's not because they had bad tools, it's because Java has a culture of over-engineering, which they soaked in and embraced. Tools & language are getting better - that's great. But that does not automatically fix the culture, which might take another decade or two. "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." At this point, Java is like BASIC. You can fix the language all you want, but you also need to fix the culture. It's not going to happen while most people won't even admit there is a problem. There's a reason Zen of Java is a joke: https://medium.com/@ratherabstract/the-zen-of-java-edd99991f8f8 https://medium.com/@ratherabstract/the-zen-of-java-edd99991f...