Comment by gkoberger
5 years ago
I think it's a grass-is-always-greener thing?
Early in your career, you lean into one or the other. And then years later, after you're confident you're right, you find yourself trying the opposite paradigm and liking things about it.
Both have pros and cons, and if there was a correct answer we'd all just go with that one!
Yeah, this is something I’ve been pondering about. I’ve been doing 10 years of C++, and after a 6 months affair with Haskell fell in love with LISP. Now I’ve been doing Clojure professionally for about 5 years, and now am in a phase where I realize the grass is not green anywhere. I’ve been shocked at some of the bugs in my Clojure code that went unnoticed for way too long, and at the same time I remember the amount of “compiler fighting” that C++ or Haskell required.
It’s just a trade-off, in the end, and depends on what poison you can digest.
I've switched between the two several times – not out of choice, just because that's what was needed. The order was BASIC, C, Python, Java, Go, Python, with Javascript mixed in the for the past few. I mostly prefer dynamic languages because static typing is just redundancy. The point of programming is to express high-level concepts which can't be captured quickly with types - if you don't understand the concept of the arguments and return types, you are missing the contract. Types can be helpful as the beginning of docs, but that's it.
Yes, types are redundant, and that is their entire point. Just as much as giving your functions and variables names is redundant, you could just number them. So is splitting up your project into multiple files, all comments, and even structural keywords themselves--you don't need "for" and "while", you just need "goto".
Take all that redundancy away and what you get is not even assembly, it's exactly machine code. We used to program computers that way when they were invented. We still do sometimes in extreme situations. We got away from it for almost all of programming because it's incredibly error prone (and tedious).