[battletested]

I really don't like the current movement of introducing static typing in dynamic typed languages. Why did we create dynamic typed languages after all? Because we know the pain of having to type everything and especially the pain of converting one type into another.

In C you mainly need static types because you cannot put 32 bits into a 16 bit CPU register, or you cannot do pointer arithmetic on values of different types, etc.. But that is not the reason why we want types in dynamically typed languages. We just want to prevent passing incompatible types as argument to a receiving method for example. And by adding static typing to dynamically typed languages we actually invalidate these languages entirely, full circle. First we create a dynamically typed language, then we change that into a statically typed language that transpiles back to a dynamically typed language, which is terribly inefficient, why would you want that? I have never been able to convince the proponents, they appear to be in some kind of higher state, having found the holy grail.

Almost all the benefits of static typing added to dynamic languages can be achieved by a better and smarter IDE. All these new 'typed' languages with all their own issues are only temporal I expect. We keep changing and rewriting while thinking we're doing it 'the right way' now.. Like Typescript, how long will that live? Flow is deprecated already. The very best thing of the C language is that it is still C, and that is fucking awesome for C developers, after all those years they can still write in the language they master.

[jldugger]

> Almost all the benefits of static typing added to dynamic languages can be achieved by a better and smarter IDE.

That does what? Typecheck things? You'd probably want a tool or library to do that, so it's pretty fortunate that Stripe bothered to provide those to us.

> We keep changing and rewriting while thinking we're doing it 'the right way' now..

Humanity has yet to rescue type inference from the forges fire on Mount Olympus. After Milner tricked Hindley in a lunchtime debate about tabs versus spaces and code quality, Hindley punished us mere mortals by placing type inference in the fires of heavily recursive forges mortals dare not touch.