It seems like a reasonable argument that there has been a dramatic rise in the number and popularity statically typed languages which feature type inference: Go, Rust, C# (to a limited extent), Scala, Swift etc. They combine the performance and safety of static typing without sacrificing expressiveness.
Have Static Languages Won?
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Re: Have Static Languages Won?
#12They have won in theory: they are arguably better in every way than dynamically typed languages (DTL) in the sense that they offer all the advantages that used to be unique to DTL and, obviously, also all the advantages of STL (automatic refactorings, performance, ease of maintenance, etc...). Javascript is the last serious holdover of the DTL generation but even it is showing tendencies to be replaced by STL (Typesc…
I think what we've seen over the last decade or so is that STLs have been updated with a lot of the features people loved about DTLs, while DTLs have not been able to add the features people love about STLs.
Ultimately, I guess it was easier to add lambdas to Java than to add solid IDE support to javascript.
Re: Have Static Languages Won?
#13Well, there's plenty of controversy in this one, but I think
Compared to CS students, the average web developer is not as passionate about programming, and not as skilled a programmer.
...probably takes the biscuit; I'm not even sure where to start with it really, apart from my complete failure to understand how "web developers" and "CS students" are supposed to be two distinct groups which are able to be compared.
Re: Have Static Languages Won?
#14They have won in theory: they are arguably better in every way than dynamically typed languages (DTL) in the sense that they offer all the advantages that used to be unique to DTL and, obviously, also all the advantages of STL (automatic refactorings, performance, ease of maintenance, etc...). Javascript is the last serious holdover of the DTL generation but even it is showing tendencies to be replaced by STL (Typesc…
Replaced? I can't see that happening in the next 5 years (an eternity in this business) Supplemented with tools like Flow? That's already a huge thing, and it's part of the React and React Native tool belt.
Re: Have Static Languages Won?
#15I hoped to have debunked, though not thoroughly, the myth that dynamic languages cannot scale to power large projects in my recent talk at Pycon CA. Just take a look at Openstack. It's powering clouds in CERN and Yahoo! Japan where it provides the infrastructure for delivering earthquake notifications to the public -- a valuable and critical service! And it's written largely in Python.
It does rely on systems written in static languages and is itself written in one... but dynamic languages are very useful for a class of problem where deferring decisions about specifics until run-time is a huge advantage. Normally this is reserved for exploratory programming but in practice it is also useful for dynamically configured systems that can introspect themselves at run-time and change that configuration or adapt to unstructured input.
Update: I'm also one of the unwashed masses that, gasp, didn't go to university and study PLT. I still have a dog-eared copy of SICP, The Dragon Book, Concrete Mathematics, et al... and started by making terrible pong clones and text adventures in BASIC on an Amiga 500.
Re: Have Static Languages Won?
#16Betteridge's Law of Headlines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Re: Have Static Languages Won?
#17JavaScript, PHP, Python, and Ruby are all in the top 5 spots on GitHub. Java is the only STL that made the cut. There are certainly types of work that seem to favor dynamic languages, because they have the ability to do some interesting things. ORMs, for example, far more powerful in dynamic languages as far as I've encountered
Re: Have Static Languages Won?
#18You can go far, quickly with a dynamic language and that's often what you need in a startup environment.
Re: Have Static Languages Won?
#19Well, there's plenty of controversy in this one, but I think Compared to CS students, the average web developer is not as passionate about programming, and not as skilled a programmer. ...probably takes the biscuit; I'm not even sure where to start with it really, apart from my complete failure to understand how "web developers" and "CS students" are supposed to be two distinct groups which are able to be compared.
I'll tell you as a web developer who is a CS grad: CS students are terrible at programming and software development when compared to someone who does it for a living. It takes more than participation in a course to develop a skill.
I understand the distinction: CS students get geared up to understand algorithms, languages, and theory. A web developer understands his tools, his workflow, his practice, and people's needs.
Re: Have Static Languages Won?
#20Which static language should supposedly have won?
> Which static language should supposedly have won? It's absolutely not that specific static languages have "won". But rather that the latest crop of static languages have proved that the oft-cited downsides of static typing, e.g. type stuttering in declarations, can be pragmatically addressed by other means, e.g. type inference. As such, the cost differential of static languages over dynamic is reduced to near-zero,…
> But rather that the latest crop of static languages have proved that the oft-cited downsides of static typing, e.g. type stuttering in declarations, can be pragmatically addressed by other means, e.g. type inference.
Meanwhile, dynamic languages like Python are adding type hints, to give many of the benefits of static typing while retaining full dynamic semantics.
The lines are getting blurry. IMO a good sign.