Comment by Xixi
1 day ago
There's been a pendulum swing of sort during my career: static languages like C++/Java, then dynamic ones like Python/Ruby/JavaScript, and now back toward typed languages like TypeScript/Rust/Swift.
My read is that people were never really against types: they were against type systems that got in the way. Older ones often weren't expressive enough, so you ended up writing verbose patterns just to appease the compiler.
That's why dynamic languages gave startups a sizable velocity edge for a while. Modern type systems (with optionals, unions/sum types, inference, etc.) are completely different.
To paraphrase a comment I once read here on Hacker News: I'll take static typing with sum types over dynamic typing, but I'll take dynamic typing over static typing without sum types...
The irony is that I got introduced to the ML type system in 1996, but the industry takes its sweet time to adopt ideas.
It's important to remember that at no point was there a pendulum swing per se, that is, only few actually ported their Java code to Python for example.
The discussions and articles online seemed to infer that, but that's uh. media bias? Hype? Things written about and things you read online are not the full story, is all.
That is a very charitable read. I remember plenty of dumbasses who said: I don't need a type system, cause I know what I am doing and I don't create bugs.