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Comment by nightski | Hacker News Reader

The older I get the less I care about "expressive power" and "speed of development". I don't view these things as an advantage most of the time, actually often the opposite. The price is always paid later on, and it is high.

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Those things are very important for getting a product off the ground. You may have a jaded view from fixing what someone else wrote, but there's a non-trivial chance that in many of those instances no such app would exist to fix had it not been for the ability to rapidly develop and launch said app.

You also speak as if speed of development/expressivity are in direct opposition of maintainability and structure, which just isn't true.

I absolute care about "speed of maintainence". There is no reason "speed of development" need be construed to mean banging out the initial garbage prototype, and only that. We can be tortoises rather than hares and still care about average speed long term.

I think we are more in agreement than your post suggests! I was mostly against the notion in the original post that dynamic/interpreted languages are the pinnacle of development speed (which is why I thought the article was referring to "speed of development" as slinging code). In reality, I care about the same average speed long term as you do and for that I'd take a statically typed language any day.

Glad to hear it!! :)

I agree untyped for more developer speed is a bad joke.

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