3 ms·

Static typing was a nightmare (by modern standards) in the 1990s. Dynamic scripting languages were such a breath of fresh air that we were willing to pay the st

by jerf 4y ago

Static typing was a nightmare (by modern standards) in the 1990s. Dynamic scripting languages were such a breath of fresh air that we were willing to pay the steep performance penalties without hardly a thought. Sort of like the saying "deleted code is debugged code", code that you actually write always performs better than the code you didn't write because it was too soul-sucking. But static typing languages, library stacks, and environments have come a long way in the last 30 years. Now I prefer even to "prototype" in static languages because the crossover to when they start providing me net benefit is around a week or so into my development process. I will not claim one is completely better than the other, but the balance is a lot more even than I would say it was ~20 years ago.

lmm 4y ago
Actually almost all the stuff that's gone mainstream in the last 30 years was already around in the '90s if you used OCaml (or indeed Haskell). But in fairness not many people did.
- jerf 4y ago
  Even the languages that were painful in the 1990s have gotten better. Some of it was the system libraries, some was just the lack of experience in API design, some was just a lack of awareness that better was even possible. While I don't like C++ at all, certainly C++ in 2023 is a lot more tolerable than C++ in 1997. I learned programming in the late 1990s. Looking at Windows programming at the time looking like gibberish to me and I looked forward to the day I would understand it. Honestly, it still looks like gibberish to me. I understand the whys and the wherefores better now and if I had no choice, yeah, I could learn it and write it, but the code from that still reads absolutely awfully to me, just unbelievably bad by almost every modern standard. Even when you're writing approximately equivalent code in C# at the same low level of acquiring handles and manipulating them with very low level APIs, it's just so much better now.
brigandish 4y ago
> Now I prefer even to "prototype" in static languages because the crossover to when they start providing me net benefit is around a week or so into my development process. I've moved from Ruby to Crystal as much as I can, and at first I found it painful but now I appreciate the myriad complaints from the type checker. It's eliminated 99% of the specs I used to have to write.

by jerf 4y ago

lmm 4y ago

Actually almost all the stuff that's gone mainstream in the last 30 years was already around in the '90s if you used OCaml (or indeed Haskell). But in fairness not many people did.

jerf 4y ago
Even the languages that were painful in the 1990s have gotten better. Some of it was the system libraries, some was just the lack of experience in API design, some was just a lack of awareness that better was even possible. While I don't like C++ at all, certainly C++ in 2023 is a lot more tolerable than C++ in 1997. I learned programming in the late 1990s. Looking at Windows programming at the time looking like gibberish to me and I looked forward to the day I would understand it. Honestly, it still looks like gibberish to me. I understand the whys and the wherefores better now and if I had no choice, yeah, I could learn it and write it, but the code from that still reads absolutely awfully to me, just unbelievably bad by almost every modern standard. Even when you're writing approximately equivalent code in C# at the same low level of acquiring handles and manipulating them with very low level APIs, it's just so much better now.

brigandish 4y ago

> Now I prefer even to "prototype" in static languages because the crossover to when they start providing me net benefit is around a week or so into my development process. I've moved from Ruby to Crystal as much as I can, and at first I found it painful but now I appreciate the myriad complaints from the type checker. It's eliminated 99% of the specs I used to have to write.