It was from 2014.
In the past decade, we've seen "the middle way" has won.
- Every mainstream OOP languages now support passing functions as parameters.
- Optional type annotation became mainstream, e.g. Typescript and modern Python.
In the past decade, we've seen "the middle way" has won.
- Every mainstream OOP languages now support passing functions as parameters.
- Optional type annotation became mainstream, e.g. Typescript and modern Python.
It became mainstream indeed but, in my opinion, it's still a mess. Optional type annotations seem like the worst of every possible world to me, and it leads to unprincipled [1] developers to just not use them or use them so inconsistently it doesn't matter and we revert to "no type annotations at all".
Just my experience, of course.
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[1] which, in the wild, is the most common type of developer. And really, features should help with the most common developer, not the most principled ones.
In this context "optional" means "you can either use or not use type annotations", which is not related to type inference [1] but is a way to gradually add types, usually in a half-baked, unsatisfying way.
[1] because unlike with Kotlin or Swift, there's no inference when you leave out the annotations, but instead you "switch off" static typechecking for portions of the code you don't want to annotate.
The middle-way languages adopted the penalties, but not the benefits. So the real winner was "lose-lose".
FP needs FP data structures. Without those, any somewhat complex program will quickly desolve into very non FP style.