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by throwaway2037 1021 days ago
For small programs, dynamic typing can be faster to write (not read). As soon as your program grows: "uh oh". Once you add maintenance into the cost equation, dynamic typing is a huge negative.

To be fair: 15 years ago, people were writing a lot of Java code that effectively used dynamic typing by passing around Object references, then casting to some type (unknowable to the reader) when using. (C#: Same.) It was infuriating, and also very difficult to read and maintain. Fortunately, most of that code is gone now in huge enterprise code bases.

1 comments

I'm not sold on this. Often I type the output I want to get, and reverse the code to get there. and that's faster because it's now all auto completing.
Interesting point. What language?
That's been my experience of powershell and typescript. To a lesser extreme python because its type hints are a bit crap.

Though I can see why you might not agree after trying an extreme like Rust. Sometimes I want to run a broken program to stop the debugger and see what I'm dealing with and rust won't do that.