[skohan]

Just because you can deploy production code without static checking does not make it a good idea. And to me if you need to rely on an external process to restart your application for NPE's etc. it is a sign your application is not that robust.

It's possible to write production code in brainfuck if that's what you really want to do. Statically checked code is easier to implement correctly, easier to modify, and easier to maintain.

[dnautics]

> Statically checked code is easier to implement correctly, easier to modify, and easier to maintain.

If that were true literally no one would program in python. Static checking is not the end all to uptime and stability. I wrote an elixir program in three days that served as a testbench for a senior's go program (which took him six months to write). This senior believes in static typechecking for everything and doesn't write unit tests. The testbench handles thousands of parallel async requests without a hiccup and even survives operating system resource exhaustion, where the go program falls over and panics.

Erlang is not statically checked (there is a static typechecker, but it's not fully typed). I promise you a well written erlang program has much higher stability than a well written go program. There is a reason why kubernetes exists, after all.

[skohan]

> If that were true literally no one would program in python.

There are many cases in which people don't choose the optimal language. But I would say the size of the python community has more to do with inertia, the breadth of libraries available, and a relatively shallow learning curve than it says about its strengths as a tool for writing good software.

I actually find that Python has some rather serious warts: the whole story around environment/version management is a mess, and the less I have to work with Python in a serious capacity the better.

> I wrote an elixir program ... The testbench handles thousands of parallel async requests without a hiccup and even survives operating system resource exhaustion, where the go program falls over and panics.

Well Erlang is specifically designed for concurrency and stability: if you want to judge your result on those two metrics I hope it is going to perform well.

I never made the claim that static typing is the "end all to uptime and stability" - static typing makes it easier to reason about your code, and to provably eliminate many issues. It's very nice that you implemented a test harness quickly, but come back to me when you've worked on a complex codebase with several other people over an extended period of time.