Ask HN: How can I get informed in the static vs. dynamic typing debate? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can I get informed in the static vs. dynamic typing debate?

2 pointszingar5 comments

Static typing has converted a bunch of people I know who started their careers with Ruby's dynamic typing. Nowadays they see static typing as an important guardrail for agent programming.

Clojure programmers are also into agentic programming. I wouldn't have thought it possible but I encounter Clojure people who are even _more_ into agentic programming. Yet Clojureconf is still full of what seem like good points against static typing.

I'd really like to understand this. Where do I start?

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This debate ended a long time ago. Every language is moving toward stronger, static typing, especially JavaScript with TypeScript, but even Python.

I don’t know of any good arguments against strong, static typing. What do you think are some?

I feel similarly. At some point in the past, many static type systems were not expressive enough to handle some of the useful strategies available to dynamic type systems.

But nowadays, pretty much all static type systems employ some (or multiple) convenient methods of polymorphism

Robert Harper's books and YouTube lectures at the Oregon PL summer school. He argues dynamic typed languages are really statically typed languages with only one type which is a union/sum type. This means you get 'less expressiveness'.

A great book where the authors specifically point out they can only achieve what they did because of dynamic typing allowing for potentially 'dangerous' operations is Software Design for Flexibility by Sussan & Hanson. In other words having to statically type all the magic would be too much intellectual overhead instead of a few lines of Scheme.

It seems to me that debate ended - at least for non-hobbyist programmers - with the modern capability of LLMs. Writing code, especially when it comes to tedious boilerplate like types, has been so abstracted away from me nowadays going back to it feels like doing maths without a calculator... and even those used to be human at one point.

Strong typing is not boilerplate-heavy in all languages (ex: TypeScript)

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