Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by snrji 2613 days ago
The trend of adding type annotations to dynamically typed languages is now unstoppable. I wonder if some more exotic features (eg. side effects handling, monads or dependent types) will ever become mainstream in the feature.
1 comments

It's hardly unstoppable its been there for literally decades. Common lisp had it for a very long time for example and has a few compiler implementations that are really quite sophisticated.

The problem is that most popular dynamic languages are really quite terrible. They have atrocious runtime environments and usually quite limiting language semantics.

It was not mainstream back then.

I agree that most popular dynamic are quite terrible. But, honestly, I think the real problem is not the particular implementations, but the whole idea of dynamic typing. At first it did make sense, but now that compiler writers have figured out "cheap" and general type inference, I don't see the point anymore.

However, I use Python on a daily basis because I have no decent alternative for the libraries I use.

You could argue that something that has been around for decades is unstoppable :)