3 ms·

There just are programmers who feel static typing is the only correct way to program. Google has always been in that camp (company wide directive, I suppose). M

There just are programmers who feel static typing is the only correct way to program. Google has always been in that camp (company wide directive, I suppose). Meanwhile, most of the internet runs on PHP. I hope it will play out so that the statical types people can use something with statical types, and the dynamic types people can happily continue with their static types.

rtpg 12y ago
(disclaimer: super ultra pro-static-types person) I really wonder whether we won't get more conversion to static types. I think the popularity of dynamic typing languages is more due to the fact that static typing used to be a major pain. But with type inference being where it is, I think most languages can start moving to static typing without any costs to the users The biggest representation of this is all the Pythonistas moving to Go. Well there's not that many, but the fact that Go "feels" like Python shows that maybe "fast and easy to use" is not as tightly coupled to "lack of typechecks" as we once thought
- Koholint 12y ago
  What makes you say "with type inference being where it is"? Have there been recent advancements?
  - rtpg 12y ago
    This is personal impression, but there haven't really been any advances in research per se, but there's been a lot of advances in tooling. Now having type inference is an "expected" feature of most languages, now that there's a good amount of institutional knowledge. Along with first-class functions and the like. These are old things but it takes a while to propagate
- facepalm 12y ago
  I've learned Go by doing a MOOC on discrete optimization. Mostly, it was fine and fun. But eventually I switched back to JavaScript out of frustration because some things were simply too complicated. Just look at the sorting library of Go. I don't think they have solved the problem of static types in a satisfactory way.

rtpg 12y ago

(disclaimer: super ultra pro-static-types person) I really wonder whether we won't get more conversion to static types. I think the popularity of dynamic typing languages is more due to the fact that static typing used to be a major pain. But with type inference being where it is, I think most languages can start moving to static typing without any costs to the users The biggest representation of this is all the Pythonistas moving to Go. Well there's not that many, but the fact that Go "feels" like Python shows that maybe "fast and easy to use" is not as tightly coupled to "lack of typechecks" as we once thought

Koholint 12y ago
What makes you say "with type inference being where it is"? Have there been recent advancements?
- rtpg 12y ago
  This is personal impression, but there haven't really been any advances in research per se, but there's been a lot of advances in tooling. Now having type inference is an "expected" feature of most languages, now that there's a good amount of institutional knowledge. Along with first-class functions and the like. These are old things but it takes a while to propagate
facepalm 12y ago
I've learned Go by doing a MOOC on discrete optimization. Mostly, it was fine and fun. But eventually I switched back to JavaScript out of frustration because some things were simply too complicated. Just look at the sorting library of Go. I don't think they have solved the problem of static types in a satisfactory way.