[cloverich]

For me personally, my new theory is its an ADD thing. I'm older but recently came to fully appreciate how ADD my mind is, and how I've basically built many habits around coping with it. More recently I learned types is one of those things. I realized with types I can off load a ton of my working memory into the type system. I can bounce between ideas the way my brain wants me to without losing any state, because I'm always setting up the interfaces to the various thoughts I had. And the IDE knows how to take advantage of course, linking everything, popping up docs and hints and etc for every little idea. And so the result is it just matches my brain's natural patterns.

I still remember being quite shocked many years ago when I took a job using Java of all things, I was so fearful coding would take forever. It was my first typed language. But within months, I was faster, by a lot. I would write a lot more code before I had to test it, and once I began testing it there were few if any surprises. Now I'm working in Ruby, and without a debugger and constant tests, I feel I can't hardly get anything complex done in a reasonable amount of time. Like you I thought this was a hurdle that would pass, but while I'm far more effective than when I started, I find that its overall just mentally taxing to write code in this language.

Yet at the same time, when I pair with people who do not dislike Ruby, and watch them work, they are constantly asking "What is this" and "how does this work" and navigating parts of the codebase by grepping. They are effective, and I know its been studied a bit. But to my eyes, they would so obviously be far more effective with types, even when they state they dislike them, I just can't accept its a generally better approach in the absolute sense. I won't judge people for preferring a non-typed language. But I'll likely not accept another job where I can't use a typed language.