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Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

In a lot of ways, yeah. Autocomplete is an absolute game changer and one of the biggest reasons that static typing came back in vogue and crushed dynamic languages. Massive productivity gains when you can ctrl+space and see all of the methods available on a variable, or use a hotkey to figure out if the method you want to call is `do_foo_bar` or `do_foo_and_bar`.

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I'm not sure I buy that argument about dynamic languages. You are probably right in that auto complete played a role, but for me working on a pure node js app back in 2014ish, it was a nightmare of runtime issues that type checking would have eliminated. The productivity gain in a typed language was not having to write unit tests for things that static typing does for free.

I agree with you, autocomplete definitely isn't the only reason for static typing making a comeback and dynamic language popularity dying off (and the big legacy names like Javascript and Python have Typescript and mypy/pyright to transform them into a facsimile of one). I think a lot of it has to do with maturity, where a lot of "move fast and break things" devs who loved untyped Node/PHP/Python got burned by bugs and impossible to comprehend legacy codebases and slowly realized the value of static typing. But that type of understanding takes years. A novice programmer can see the value of autocomplete and not having to check the docs or stackoverflow for the name of a method pretty much instantly.

autocomplete accurately took care of a lot of the boilerplate; that low-hanging fruit has been picked. AI is not doing the same IME, the pay-off has been a lot slower coming, and sometimes it's making the work more painful.

I do agree. It's hard to get an unbiased assessment of how many developers are actually using generative AI (copilot/chatgpt) for work, and in what capacity they do use them. Anecdotally, at my org of ~40 devs, we encouraged everyone to try out Copilot and let us know if they wanted a full license; only 2 people took up the offer, and they use it either for generating unit tests or translating English data logic to pandas syntax (which it does seem quite good at!)

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