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Why Static Typing Came Back • Richard Feldman • GOTO 2022

GOTO Conferences · 157.1K views · 2023-06-05 · 52:01

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Overview

Richard Feldman's GOTO Copenhagen 2022 talk on why dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, PHP and JavaScript rose in the 1990s and why each now has a popular static type checker. It argues that modern static typing recovers the advantages that made dynamic languages attractive.

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HN commenters cite it as a clear account of the trade-offs between static and dynamic typing and why the industry is swinging back to types.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2023–2024

Topics

Programming language designPython, Ruby & scripting languagesWeb development
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static typingdynamic languagesgradual typingprogramming language historytype checkers

What people said

raphlinus · 2023-07 · Strong recommendation

I think the suitable followup to this is the Richard Feldman talk, "Why Static Typing Came Back."[1] It gives the major reasons why one would prefer one over the other, and makes the case that static types can provide most of the actual benefits of dynamic languages, but the reverse is not true. [1]: [VIDEO]

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raphlinus · 2023-09 · Recommendation

Yeah, Rich Feldman has a good talk on this, entitled Why Static Typing Came Back[1]. It makes a good argument that static typing can recover most of the advantages traditionally accounted to dynamic typing. Rapid iteration you can get from incremental compilers, being concise you can get from powerful type inference, etc. Conversely, the advantages of static typing (largely boiling down to increased reliability) cannot easily be captured by dynamically typed languages. Gradual typing, particularly successful by TypeScript, might be an interesting middle ground, or it might just be a reflection of the dynamic history of JS. [1]: [VIDEO]

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dansalvato · 2023-07 · Recommendation

I saw a talk that touched on this recently: [VIDEO] He explains that dynamically-typed languages like Python, Ruby, and JS became popular in the 90s because they offered a fast feedback loop for website building, and they didn't need an IDE or compilers, which were slow (and often not free). It ended up not being worth trading your development time for the performance increase when all your users were connecting via 56k modem anyway. The talk makes a lot of other cool points about how development has changed in the past decade or two, and why the trend is moving back to static typing.

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