[gnaritas]

> Lisp and Smalltalk actually suffer from the same problem: late-binding sucks.

That's a feature, not a bug. Late binding rocks.

> This plays havoc with your ability to do static analysis, and languages that hinder static analysis should not be used in real-world systems.

The real world is full of late bound languages; much of the internet runs off late bound languages including this site. There's a million Rails and Python apps out there, so basically this "opinion" of yours is not bound to reality.

All of biology is late-bound, cells communicate via message passing, so the oldest and most complex real world systems we know of are late bound. To dismiss late binding is naive at best.

[shawk]

> That's a feature, not a bug. Late binding rocks.

So much that you can see ripples everywhere of late binding languages being slowly (not saying the transition is complete) replaced by static languages. Even the one true bastion of late binders, web development, is seeing massively increasing adoptions of languages like Typescript on the frontend, and languages like Go on the backend (see adoption at Youtube, Dropbox and so on).

Outside of web development, and simple trivial admin scripts, the other major source of late bound software was.. Apple Objective C. Which is getting replaced by Swift, a language that heavily favors static typing and functional paradigms.

> There's a million Rails and Python apps out there, so basically this "opinion" of yours is not bound to reality.

There's a million of trivial CRUD apps that don't do much of worth and whose death the world would not really mind either. DHH, rails's author, didn't mind restarting his basecamp servers 400 times a day because of a memory leak. These people are not software engineers. They're cave men using glue other people made to tie together rocks to build stonewalls. Which will then fall as soon as the weather stops being nice. Security, reliability, performance, what do they know about any of these things? But hey, you can do cute things like 3.days.from_now, what a great framework!

[armitron]

You're all over the place here and your arguments make no sense whatsoever when examined.

First, you conflate mass-appeal with some sort of objective "better" criterion which is of course bonkers. To use one of your own examples against you, there are hundreds of thousands of Java monkeys out there that are using glue other people made to tie together rocks to build stonewalls. Which do fail as soon as the weather stops being nice. Security (you should look into Java deserialization bugs), reliability, performance what do they know about any of these things?

Second, you conflate late-binding as present in Lisp and Smalltalk with late-binding present in other dynamic languages. The two are not equivalent, a perfect example of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Lisp and Smalltalk will never become popular (read my previous comment), but that does not mean that they do not sit on an apex and still have a lot to give. To anyone interested in the "craft of programming", "the Art", there is nothing better period. Here are some references for you, from the masters themselves:

[1] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyIQKBzIuBY

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc

[goatlover]

There's tons of R and Python code in scientific computing that's not being replaced by static languages. Anyway, dynamic languages have been around since the 60s. This debate is very old. Trends in one direction or another swing back and forth. If you're going to mention Go, Swift or Rust, what about Elixir or Julia? They're new languages, too.

[gnaritas]

We get it, you're a static typing fan, this debate is as old as the hills, but late bound dynamic languages are not going anywhere, are not being replaced, and will continue be popular and make money because what you don't seem to get is that we don't all agree static typing is the golden hammer you seem to think it is. Yes, those people are software engineers despite your unwarranted superiority. And Rust... please, in time maybe but right now it's hardly used and can not remotely be called a popular language, not in comparison with the popular dynamic languages which dwarf it in usage by orders of magnitude.

[kazinator]

We need only enough static analysis to reliably go from machine language on a silicon CPU to robust late binding. After/above that, fuck it.