Why Static Typing Came Back (2022) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tml94je2edk

by plainOldText • 3 years ago

2 1 3 years ago

Rochus• 3 years ago

Interesting arguments and he apparently still prefers dynamic languages, but I was surprised that there was no mention of Smalltalk which was a rather important technology in the nineties and in fact the first dynamic OO language. The increase of compile speed might well be part of the explanation that static typing is again more popular; but the author himself mentions Delphi which had (like other Pascal compilers) a very fast compiler even in the nineties and before; and even with C++ you could get very fast compile times depending how you managed headers and templates. The advantage of better IDE support with static typing is often mentioned and a good argument, but by the end of the day it's just much more robust to build a large software system in a statically typed language, and people got more aware of this during the last twenty years because the ever bigger applications built with JS. There was an interesting documentary about TypeScript posted on HN recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37626689) where the responsibles made it clear that building a system like e.g. VSCode would not have been possible with plain JS. Gradual typing might be a good thing to integrate teams with both static and dynamic typing preferences, but the result is still a dynamically typed runtime.

Why Static Typing Came Back (2022) [video]

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