[stcredzero]

I'd like to see projects that can integrate the runtime information provided by a JIT VM. What if such a project used this information from the start? Then, the programmers might be able to use information like: This variable has only ever had an int in it, ever, over the entire lifetime of the app.

Such information might be problematic to integrate into a legacy project, but in a language which allowed for optional type annotation, such information could be fed into programmer tools and more easily analyzed. (Example: So, this code here where it's not an int -- do we really need to have this, or could we move the error checking elsewhere, so we can just say that's an int?)

[douche]

Or you could use a language with static typing. It might be the line of work that I'm in, but I've never encountered a case where dynamic typing has really been helpful - more often it's been a source of errors, where non-obvious type coercion has been performed by the interpreter/runtime. I can only think of one case where dynamic typing was necessary, but I'll chalk that up to a really poorly designed COM API that I had to work with.

[jcranmer]

The problems most people have with static typing are related to explicit typing, not static typing per se. (And somewhat inane conversions tend to give dynamic typing a bad name as well).

There are two cases I can think of where the static typing in the most common languages are insufficient. The first is union types--you can't easily express a data structure like JSON in Java (although one could argue this is a feature, not a bug). The second case is where you need to map types to instances of those types, something akin to a Map<Class<T>, T> in Java syntax. While you can generally specify the latter at a method syntax (e.g., public <T> T get(Class<T> clazz)), there's no way to write that method without having to resort to subverting the type system.

Dynamic typing can be beneficial if you would otherwise be stuck subverting the type system more often than following it, although that's as much of an argument for more powerful static type system as it is one for dynamic typing.

[clock_tower]

I've had the same experience -- that dynamic typing brings nothing to the party, and often actively gets in the way. I love C++'s extensible explicit static types (enums and structs), and when I don't have them in other languages, I miss them badly. I strongly suspect that dynamic typing is a fad, which will go away as languages change -- especially if programmers stop anthropomorphizing their code and assuming that it wants freedom and liberty. (Imagine if architects imagined that brick or structural steel wanted to be free!)

My experience is in healthcare, machine-language comprehension, enthusiast game development (roughly roguelike-ish -- I haven't ever scraped together the capital and the courage for graphics and music), a little genetic programming, and a little web development (where I outright used Hungarian notation to make Javascript less incomprehensible). What areas have you had experience in, where you've experienced the same?

[monocasa]

You could probably do this on native code with something like HP's Dynamo combined with the original symbols.