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by goatlover
993 days ago
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It's not an anti-feature. Those languages gained popularity in part because they were dynamically typed. But this debate is decades old and people always dogmatically choose one side, so not really any point in trying to convince you. Alan Kay made the argument back in the 1970s that type systems were always too limiting, therefore classes and late binding were the answer for him. |
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It was a massive waste of time to have to read piles of code code, use a debugger and inspect object structure, to understand how some parts of certain large codebases worked.
In my experience, dynamic typing has simply been horrible for team collaboration, code readability (and ease of understanding), and it results in a large number of bugs that could easily have been eliminated with static type checking.
> But this debate is decades old and people always dogmatically choose one side, so not really any point in trying to convince you.
You’re right about that. I am indeed very dogmatic and take a hard-line on this. I take a stronger position on this than most things (for example: something very subjective like curly braces versus white space indentation), to the point that I’ll say this: dynamic typing is simply a wrong and bad engineering decision.
Another example of a bad language design decision is allowing null to be a part of every type instead of requiring an explicit ? in the type, or the use of an Optional wrapper. This has been recognized as an ill, andis something many modern languages (to name a few: Rust, Kotlin, etc) fixes.
But that isn’t meant to level a personal attack against the languages designers of the past (or to say that they were stupid). Allowing every type to be Union[T, null] was a simply a language design mistake (that potentially cost wasted billions of dollars), but it's been recognized as a mistake today that we need to rectify and move forward from (as is reflected by decision made by more recent languages).
However, imo, in comparison, dynamic typing is a 100 times worse than not having null safety (or not having memory safety like C or C++). I can work with a C or C++ without much trouble, but not with dynamic typing. Dynamic typing makes it difficult and unpleasant to work with a large codebase, to an inexcusable degree.