The Inconvenient Truth About Dynamic vs. Static Typing

blog.jooq.org

2 points·redshift1010··3 comments

Since static typing systems use dynamic typing to determine the static types, his comment about dynamic types languages being dead is simply wrong.

Many years ago, it became obvious that static typing is useful in some class of programs, dynamic typing is useful in another class of programs and soft typing is useful across them all.

A range of typing systems exist now, they will continue to exist into the future as long as we have need of digitally based computing systems.

We live it and we continue to solve the problems put before us.

As a side not, it was interesting that he didn't specify a List("abc", 0, 0.2) and answer what the static type of such would be. There are many examples of data structures that has non-uniform base types which can only be determined at runtime.

Let the silly season start.

In Java, the type of such a List("abc", 0, 0.2) would be List<? extends Serializable & Comparable<?>> or something like that. There's always an appropriate type for any expression.

> Dynamically typed languages are dead

The author seems to overlook existing efforts from the dynamically typed end of the spectrum to add type inferencing and optional static typing to dynamic languages. Either as type checkers e.g., mypy [1] or for runtime improvements.

[1]: http://mypy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

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