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by moxious
3487 days ago
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People vote with their feet, and while I'm really sympathetic to everything you're saying about static typing, it's hard to argue that reality is producing a lot of really popular dynamically typed languages. JS being exhibit #1, but also python, ruby, clojure, and on and on. Take a look at how fast javascript mutates, I'd argue that rate of mutation is one of the things you can do in a dynamically typed language. Java doesn't mutate like that, despite having many of the same ecosystem pressures, such as the pressure to "be good at everything" because it's so widely used. That mutation often comes with unneeded parts and kludges, but the rate of mutation and change in the JS ecosystem has also been a huge positive. Still, TANSTAAFL and all that, I'm certainly not saying it's all good -- but I think you overstate it considerably when you say "A lot to lose and nothing to gain with dynamic typing" |
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You don't see such sweeping changes in other languages that have been around much longer and used more widely than js.
JavaScript just got a package manager, the module system was hacked on a few years ago and still isn't standardized, the build tools change every other year and still largely suck, it still doesn't support multithreading, the object system is super wonky, it doesn't support specific float/integers which seems to break math constantly. None of these things are an issue in any other language I can think of, these features are in language V1.0
I expect developers to jump ship immediately when a replacement without these core problems reaches critical mass.
Google has been looking into this for a while, and Dart was designed with the assumption that JavaScript fundamentally sucks and can't be fixed.
This has happened before... Look what happened the perl when Python started to gain steam. It used to be pretty much the #1 way to write websites, now you would be a fool to use perl over Python on almost anything.