Comment by throwaway2037

My programming path is similar to yours! Started with C++ then moved into Perl. Then realised that uber-dynamic-typing in Perl was a death-trap in enterprise software. Then oddly found satisfaction in Excel/VBA because you can write more strictly-typed code in VBA (there is also a dynamic side) and even safely call the Win32 API directly. Finally, I came back to C++ and Java which are "good enough" for expressing the static types that I need. The tooling and open-source ecosystem in Java makes it very hard to be more productive in other languages (except maybe C#, but they are in the same language family). I'm a role now that also has some Python. While the syntactical sugar is like written prose, the weaker typing (than C++/Java) is brutal in larger projects. Unless people are fastidious about type annotations, I constantly struggle to reason about the code while (second-)guessing about types.

You wrote: <<I wish C++ type system was more expressive.>> Can you share an idea? For example: Java 17 (due for release in the fall) will feature sealed classes. This looks very cool. For years, I (accidentally) simulated this behaviour using enums tied to instances or types.