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Have to agree with you, but with a little bit of additional context. I get why people started rejecting statically typed languages. I work with many different languages, but started with statically typed languages with various forms of static typing (Pascal was my first, but then C and C++). Dynamic languages offer flexibility that statically typed languages lack. Most of the time, the flexibility rejected by static typing ends up being a good thing as it encourages sane code that can be analyzed by the compiler and prevent runtime bugs, so I've always accepted this sacrifice of flexibility as a feature rather than a hindrance. However, I've found myself recently writing many solutions using TypeScript[0] and I'm finding its static type system, which allows one to configure the strictness, to be incredibly powerful. It's helped, first, by fantastic support for union types, type inference and duck typing. I find that the compiler, which is little more than a transpiler with a static analyser bolted on top of it, catches errors that I make and greatly reduces runtime WTFs while still allowing me to write terse, simple code that isn't littered with unnecessary type annotations. I add typings where either the implicit type detection can't predict the type for me or where it decreases cognitive overhead while reading code and leave them out when the opposite is true. This moves the bar back a little bit toward the flexibility side -- I can do things in code that are completely illegal in C# that result in less code, yet not increase my runtime bugs or decrease readability in the process. And if there's something truly harry that has to be done, I can tell the compiler to simply ignore the violation and give me the JavaScript output that I want regardless of what you think it's going to do. ...and I find myself longing for that type system everywhere else. So while I am still a huge proponent of statically typed languages and I don't see that changing any time, precisely how the static type system works and what features it supports is becoming very important to me. [0] Which, considering how much I hate JavaScript, was a huge surprise considering it's basically ES6 JavaScript with optional type annotations. |