Hacker News Reader

Comment by profquail | Hacker News Reader

the rest of the world is falling in love with the "power" of weak typing systems

Really? I'd argue the exact opposite -- with F# and Scala (and some others) on the rise, I think there are plenty of people who are fed up with weak/dynamic typing and want to take advantage of building programs with strong type systems.

At the very least, it seems that the programming world is becoming much more polarized. Anecdotally, it seems that every developer I know is either a proponent of strong/static typing or weak/dynamic typing -- but I don't know anyone that's just sitting on the fence.

View on HN

I'm certainly going the other way. After working almost exclusively in dynamic languages for almost 10 years I'm finding it enormously refreshing to have the help of the compiler again when I'm writing Scala code. Even the primitive type system of Objective-C is a welcome change. Of course, occasionally you need an escape hatch. But, in my experiences, the good static languages give you enough wiggle room to do this when you really need to.

The term "strong" appears overloaded here. A language can be dynamically typed, but still have strong typing (in the sense that the language, whether at compile time or runtime, enforces what operations are allowed on a particular value).

This is true. Lisp compiles beautifully if you put the work into making it do so, and this work can be automated with macros.

Those in favor of only static typing and those in favor of only dynamic typing are living in the past. Any interesting evolution in programming languages will allow developers to program with and without types / contracts from the same language.

C#'s new "dynamic" type and Scala's new Dynamic trait are a step in that direction.

In Mascara (my own project) you can start out with dynamically typed JavaScript, but then gradually add type annotation as appropriate to provide stronger verification. It can be done using structural types without changing the runtime semantics, and further by rewriting to use classes and nominal typing.

I think this provides a useful upgrade path, because type verification is a hassle with small projects, but becomes increasingly valuable (IMHO) as the program grows.

The problem with current languages is that you have to decide upfront if you want a language optimized for quick development or strong verification. But often in the real world, programs start out as quick prototypes, and then grow into large applications.

Qi is a lisp-like language with Haskell-style type-checking which can be turned on and off at will:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi_(programming_language)#Type_...

I'm a fence-sitter, but as you note, it's unlikely you know me. I do find that I'm starting to lean more on the strong/static side lately, but that might be because professionally I write financial institution software which tends to be big, and I want as much checked as early and as thoroughly as possible.

For fun hobby stuff, I love dynamic languages where I can produce quite a bit of functionality in a very short (if dangerous) time and rely on a set of tests to keep it all managed.

After a few years of fence-sitting doing a lot of ruby, I find myself... still sitting on the fence. My next project will probably be in erlang and haskell, for what it's worth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com