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Comment by UK-Al05 | Hacker News Reader

Most of the oldies I know prefer static typing.

A lot of the new people use dynamic types because that's all they know.

This. I'm an oldie and I prefer static typing. Heck, I can't even get my head around dynamically typed languages. And for any non-trivial production level software I strongly believe the choice of programming language has no bearing on the productivity. I.e., a team of Java experts will be as much productive in a Java stack as a team of python experts in a Python stack.

A big reason for the recent shift towards dynamic languages, in my opinion, is what's taught in college now a days. I believe it's mostly Python or the likes. In my college days (late 1990s) it was all statically typed languages (Fortran, Cobol, C, Pascal etc.,). So that's how my generation ended up learning to model a problem and solution in statically typed languages and natural preference towards them.

I agree. People obsess about the choice of programming language, insisting that months of study are needed to choose. I just don't see it except for very specialized tools or applications.

That said, I find maintaining an old, large application written in an untyped language pretty miserable.

I've had equal misery both typed and untyped on large, old, legacy stuff.

Maybe programming just sucks.

At least you don't have to read the method to figure out the input and output types. And the IDE can help you much more. I find these things big when trying to modify some massive codebase I don't know inside and out.

True. I started coding a couple years ago and used a static typed language for the first time a couple months ago. Definitely don't want to go back.

Care to define "old"? I'm 38, and the programmers I know that are older than me don't seem to have a significantly different spread compared to younger (excluding 1-language programmers in both cases).

Maybe a bit less python and a bit more of one of: perl/awk/apl/smalltalk but still they seem to choose untyped languages over typed languages when they are unconstrained to pick the language.

Only until they have to refactor an older codebase of some size...

They who? Old or new?

"A lot of the new people"

But that's only if they also got some experience working with static typing. Without that, they won't see the difference in difficulty, as they have no reference to compare to.

Feeling the pain would already be a good start :-). With a lot of Javascript projects being very short term a lot of people never get the experience of maintaining a code base for years.

Ah, thank you for disambiguating the pronoun 'they' whose reference wasn't clear as you provided no antecedent.

EDIT: Heh, kind of ironic really. A pronoun without an antecedent is like a variable in a dynamic programming language whose context isn't clear.

I guess I am a dynamic writer but a strongly typed programmer :-)

That's when they become old people

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