5 ms·

"But hear me out: all the arguments against dynamic languages and dynamic typing systems were already there [in 2015]! Nothing new has been invented, nothing re

by jerf 3y ago

"But hear me out: all the arguments against dynamic languages and dynamic typing systems were already there [in 2015]! Nothing new has been invented, nothing really has changed." I think what changed is the static languages got a lot better. Static languages when Python was invented were awful. Now I can write very sensible code in static languages that looks almost as nice as dynamic code, while still carrying all the benefits of dynamic languages. That's what flipped the cost/benefit tradeoff for me; yeah, I'm personally a bit grumpy about Python just getting more and more complex, but if it was 2023 Python versus early 2000s static languages I'd still be using Python. But that's not the choice I face.

rwmj 3y ago
ML & Hindley Milner type inference was invented in 1978 or so. Static languages have been good for a very long time.
- ninkendo 3y ago
  The point is that most of the popular statically-typed languages (C, C++, Java, C#) didn’t have any type inference when python got really popular. (Edited from “was invented” to “got really popular”… python was invented before Java or C#… Type inference in these major language didn’t happen until circa 2010 or later.)
- jerf 3y ago
  Come on. I know what early 2000s Haskell was like. It's a slim minority view even on the Haskell reddit that it was/is production-ready for anything, and it certainly wasn't useful for networking and had a lot of other significant issues... and it would be the premiere Hindley-Milner language available at the time. It is missing a ton of things that Haskell programmers would consider basic necessities now, even in the language itself, to say nothing of libraries. Haskell slipped from research language to production-ready for at least many tasks very gradually, so it's hard to put a date on it, but that date is definitely late 200x at the earliest, and mid-2010s is probably a lot more realistic.
  - xscott 3y ago
    ML (later StandardML) is a very nice language which has been around since the 70s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language) Significantly before Haskell, and certainly worth looking at. I'm not sure why it lost in the popularity wars. Maybe it lost to C/Pascal/C++ because it had garbage collection and then never regained its footing.
    - jerf 3y ago
      I have never seen a serious case that ML is production-ready, not in the early 2000s and not now. I do not mean this as some sort of major criticism or anything, just as a brute engineering fact. It's not like Haskell has a huge suite of programs I can point at that people use because they are legitimately useful and not because they are Haskell programmers (Pandoc, XMonad, and honestly I'm already coming up a bit dry here), but I can still point to more than I can ML, which is a flat zero.
      - xscott 3y ago
        Heh, that's probably true about being "production-ready", but I think you're conflating quality with popularity, and there are plenty of counterexamples to that. The point was that there have been good staticly typed languages for a pretty long time now. I guess we could debate what "good" means...
        jerf 3y ago
        No, I'm not conflating quality with popularity; I am telling you the definition of the term I am using. You are welcome to your own definitions but you need to label them as such. There was no option in the early 2000s of deploying any significant production software in ML. You can see this very easily, let me make a list: C++, C, Java, ML. Which one doesn't belong to the set "production-quality language in 2001"? Anyone who can't answer that is just being deliberately obtuse. Even though Java was jammed into that list more by executive fiat than anything else, it was still in that list. You may like ML a lot, you may have preferred to work in it, but it is very clearly not able to run in the same spaces as C++/C/Java. I used Haskell circa 2012 to build a highly concurrent network server for a game contest. I'm glad it was just a game contest and the biggest stakes were which college student got the grand prize. It crashed under load. Really quite a bit; I was restarting it about every hour, under what would have been a trivial amount of load by any production standard. And it was just Haskell bugs; as Haskell advanced, the exact same code crashed less and less. Probably it would be fine today. But this is the sort of thing I mean; even if you like the language, production shines a really, really harsh light on a language. Having a theoretically superior concurrency solution didn't make my code not crash the runtime. Having a theoretically superior typing solution still leaves a language needing tested libraries, tested framework, exposure to real world situations. The odds of hitting a critical snag is just too high otherwise. Even today, telling me that you're building a critical system in ML would basically be a firing offense (if you obstinately stuck by it). I'm as open minded about languages as anybody, but I know enough to know with close-enough-for-business-certainty that it's a bad business decision. Should the ML community suddenly revive and fix up the language over the next 5-10 years, I'd happily reconsider, but today? No question. Even Haskell would be a very uphill battle, for many good and sufficient business reasons, but maybe you could just about convince me there's some task you just need it for.
dbtc 3y ago
What are your preferred typed languages?
- kagakuninja 3y ago
  No them, but my favorite is Scala. It can look as clean as Python, especially with Scala 3 which makes braces optional. But then I have the type system, which saves my ass every day. Maybe I am just an old dog who can't memorize complex code bases like in my youth. The good thing is that I no longer need to do that.
DylanSp 3y ago
Not only the static languages, but the tooling around them; better type-driven autocomplete and solid support in editors that aren't as heavyweight as Visual Studio or Eclipse [1]. [1] I think that's what was popular in the Java world at the time? I'm not sure on this.

by jerf 3y ago

rwmj 3y ago

ML & Hindley Milner type inference was invented in 1978 or so. Static languages have been good for a very long time.

ninkendo 3y ago
The point is that most of the popular statically-typed languages (C, C++, Java, C#) didn’t have any type inference when python got really popular. (Edited from “was invented” to “got really popular”… python was invented before Java or C#… Type inference in these major language didn’t happen until circa 2010 or later.)
jerf 3y ago
Come on. I know what early 2000s Haskell was like. It's a slim minority view even on the Haskell reddit that it was/is production-ready for anything, and it certainly wasn't useful for networking and had a lot of other significant issues... and it would be the premiere Hindley-Milner language available at the time. It is missing a ton of things that Haskell programmers would consider basic necessities now, even in the language itself, to say nothing of libraries. Haskell slipped from research language to production-ready for at least many tasks very gradually, so it's hard to put a date on it, but that date is definitely late 200x at the earliest, and mid-2010s is probably a lot more realistic.
- xscott 3y ago
  ML (later StandardML) is a very nice language which has been around since the 70s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language) Significantly before Haskell, and certainly worth looking at. I'm not sure why it lost in the popularity wars. Maybe it lost to C/Pascal/C++ because it had garbage collection and then never regained its footing.
  - jerf 3y ago
    I have never seen a serious case that ML is production-ready, not in the early 2000s and not now. I do not mean this as some sort of major criticism or anything, just as a brute engineering fact. It's not like Haskell has a huge suite of programs I can point at that people use because they are legitimately useful and not because they are Haskell programmers (Pandoc, XMonad, and honestly I'm already coming up a bit dry here), but I can still point to more than I can ML, which is a flat zero.
    - xscott 3y ago
      Heh, that's probably true about being "production-ready", but I think you're conflating quality with popularity, and there are plenty of counterexamples to that. The point was that there have been good staticly typed languages for a pretty long time now. I guess we could debate what "good" means...
      - jerf 3y ago
        No, I'm not conflating quality with popularity; I am telling you the definition of the term I am using. You are welcome to your own definitions but you need to label them as such. There was no option in the early 2000s of deploying any significant production software in ML. You can see this very easily, let me make a list: C++, C, Java, ML. Which one doesn't belong to the set "production-quality language in 2001"? Anyone who can't answer that is just being deliberately obtuse. Even though Java was jammed into that list more by executive fiat than anything else, it was still in that list. You may like ML a lot, you may have preferred to work in it, but it is very clearly not able to run in the same spaces as C++/C/Java. I used Haskell circa 2012 to build a highly concurrent network server for a game contest. I'm glad it was just a game contest and the biggest stakes were which college student got the grand prize. It crashed under load. Really quite a bit; I was restarting it about every hour, under what would have been a trivial amount of load by any production standard. And it was just Haskell bugs; as Haskell advanced, the exact same code crashed less and less. Probably it would be fine today. But this is the sort of thing I mean; even if you like the language, production shines a really, really harsh light on a language. Having a theoretically superior concurrency solution didn't make my code not crash the runtime. Having a theoretically superior typing solution still leaves a language needing tested libraries, tested framework, exposure to real world situations. The odds of hitting a critical snag is just too high otherwise. Even today, telling me that you're building a critical system in ML would basically be a firing offense (if you obstinately stuck by it). I'm as open minded about languages as anybody, but I know enough to know with close-enough-for-business-certainty that it's a bad business decision. Should the ML community suddenly revive and fix up the language over the next 5-10 years, I'd happily reconsider, but today? No question. Even Haskell would be a very uphill battle, for many good and sufficient business reasons, but maybe you could just about convince me there's some task you just need it for.

dbtc 3y ago

What are your preferred typed languages?

kagakuninja 3y ago
No them, but my favorite is Scala. It can look as clean as Python, especially with Scala 3 which makes braces optional. But then I have the type system, which saves my ass every day. Maybe I am just an old dog who can't memorize complex code bases like in my youth. The good thing is that I no longer need to do that.

DylanSp 3y ago

Not only the static languages, but the tooling around them; better type-driven autocomplete and solid support in editors that aren't as heavyweight as Visual Studio or Eclipse [1]. [1] I think that's what was popular in the Java world at the time? I'm not sure on this.