What is an item in the second declaration? That it has type "Item" doesn't help you unless you have contextual information. And if you have contextual information you can probably figure out what an item is in the first declaration too.
The only citation I have is the tenuous grip I have on my own sanity - I could have more correctly talked about the incredible amount of mental overhead this has _for me_, but read the rest of the thread and you’ll see that this isn’t an uncommon experience. As I said, if you can work around this then you have my respect.
What you see in a statically typed language: IBlaha blah. What could blah be? An IBlaha. What could IBlaha be? Anything! The type has not gained you anything.
> The only citation I have is the tenuous grip I have on my own sanity
That's an argument from authority where you are the authority. It doesn't work on HN since we are all skilled developers. I've also been a software developer for decades and I can count on one hand the times static types has provided a tangible benefits.
Of course you could say the same thing about sane naming dynamic naming conventions for your declarations in a dynamically typed language - and you wouldn’t be wrong, but a compiler won’t help you in the case of human error. All I’m interested in is offloading as much complexity onto the tools at my disposal, so I can focus on what’s important.
On my citation … that was tongue in cheek and I thought it was obvious. I don’t have a citation, this is all my own experience. For the third time, if you can work your way around this you have my respect.
Dynamically typed languages are very popular so it seems that many developers can work their way around dynamic typing.
That definition is rarely as accessible as an explicit type though. For example take an API response or any third party library. Determining the data type isn't as quick as simply scanning a function for the object definition.
- Dynamically typed languages are very popular so it seems that many developers can work their way around dynamic typing.
As someone who has spent a fairly even mix of their career using typed/untyped languages, I think this is due to a few reasons:
- Lower initial learning curve.
- Lower barrier to entry.
Those are real benefits, but I would argue most projects quickly hit a point where they benefit from static analysis.
Having worked with 100s of devs at this point, I'm yet to meet one that after learning a typed language and using it for a sufficient period of time (more than a few months) wants to use an untyped language for anything outside of small scripts.
You're confusing Java-type extreme (and also mostly strawmanned) application of OOP with static typing.
Not every type in your program has to be AbstractFactoryProxyBeanInterface, and if you don't write code like that it's either obvious or some kind of extension interface for non-core code.