[throwaway894345]

> They're also riding on the static typing trend that's happening right now, so type-safety is also part of the equation

I think the "static typing trend" is a product of Rust and Go showing people that static typing doesn't have to be cumbersome like it was in 90s-00s Java, C++, and C#. Indeed, I suspect that the quality of life improvements that Java, C#, and C++ made also improved the stock price of static typing (and building on that foundation, things like TypeScript are exposing JavaScript developers to the utility of types). Which is to say, static typing isn't an empty trend or fad (no idea if that's your intended meaning) but rather people were previously averse to static typing because the mainstream statically typed languages weren't ergonomic and people assumed that the bad ergonomics was caused by static typing--now we have many mainstream languages that show that this isn't the case.

[Zababa]

That wasn't my intended meaning, I don't think static typing is a "fad". I think the "new" typed languages (Go, Rust, Typescript) are more ergonomic than 90s-00s Java, C++, C#, as you said. This is also forcing them to improve, with features like type inference, sealed classes, records. I also think that the combination of gradual typing and type inference is playing a big role in the adoption.

However, I called static typing a "trend", and I'll try to explain why. I think attempts to type Python, JS, Ruby and the popularity of Go and Rust are the natural consequences of people departing from the Java/C++ ecosystem 10-20 years earlier (for good reasons). Now they are rediscovering the good parts of this ecosystem (ease of deployment with binaries/fat jars, static typing, performance). Since Twitter, Github, Youtube, Shopify, Instagram, etc have all that code around, they are going to either improve it, or try to migrate from it. For example, Shopify is working on a compiler to native for Ruby based on LLVM https://sorbet.org/blog/2021/07/30/open-sourcing-sorbet-comp.... Instagram is working on a performance-oriented CPython fork https://github.com/facebookincubator/cinder. Twitter, from what I understand, went back to Java, going through Scala first (which is another example of "better type system"). KhanAcademy is migrating services from a Django monolith to Go services https://blog.khanacademy.org/half-a-million-lines-of-go/. Whatsapp even had a project to do a statically typed "Erlang 2".

The "trend" here is that some companies that use "new" dynamic languages in the 00s are now very large companies that have enough money to invest in language, tooling and things like that.

[throwaway894345]

Makes sense. Thanks for clarifying!