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Why Static Typing Came Back • Richard Feldman • GOTO 2022

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  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Richard Feldman, creator of Roc
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

157K views3 years ago2 recommendations

Programming languagesSoftware designLanguage design and type systems

Richard Feldman explains why dynamically typed languages dominated the 1990s and how modern static typing has evolved to reclaim those advantages.

This presentation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2022. #GOTOcon #GOTOcph gotocph.com Richard Feldman - Functional Programming Language Expert & Author of “Elm in Action” @rtfeldman @SoftwareUnscripted RESOURCES roc-lang.org twitter.com/sw_unscripted Richard twitter.com/rtfeldman github.com/rtfeldman linkedin.com/in/rtfeldman ABSTRACT The 1990s birthed #Python, #Ruby, #PHP, and #JavaScript - dynamic programming languages that went on to be extremely popular. Today, each has a widely used static type-checker: #mypy, #Sorbet, #Hack, and #TypeScript. By #RedMonk rankings, the most popular languages released in the past 15 years have been TypeScript, Go, #Kotlin, #Swift, #Dart, and #Rust - all statically typed. If a generation of popular dynamically typed languages grew out of dissatisfaction with 1990s-era statically typed languages, what changed? Is it a matter of fashion, and the pendulum will soon swing back to favoring dynamic again? Is gradual typing the future, because it promises the best of both worlds? If so, then why aren't Go, Kotlin, Swift, or Rust gradually typed? (Dart was originally, and later changed to static!) Why has static typing made such a comeback in the past decade? And what does it mean for the future? This talk dives into all of these questions, and more! [...] TIMECODES Intro Programming language rankings for Jan. 2022 What happened? - Outline What made dynamic typing get big? What changed? What does this mean for the future? Prediction Summary Outro Download slides and read the full abstract here: gotocph.com/2022/sessions/2215 RECOMMENDED BOOKS Richard Feldman • Elm in Action • amzn.to/387kujI Tim McNamara • Rust in Action • amzn.to/3ux2R9u Cristian Salcescu • Functional Programming in JavaScript • amzn.to/3y75jBS twitter.com/GOTOcon linkedin.com/company/goto- instagram.com/goto_con facebook.com/GOTOConferences #StaticTyping #DynamicTyping #FunctionalProgramming #Roclang #Golang #Elmlang #Programming #ProgrammingLanguage #SoftwareEngineering #RichardFeldman CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket at gotopia.tech Sign up for updates and specials at gotopia.tech/newsletter SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL - new videos posted almost daily. youtube.com/user/GotoConferences/?sub_confirmation=1

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as a compelling explanation of the shift back toward static typing and how modern type systems solve historical pain points.

raphlinuson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Dynamic Languages Strike Back (2008)”

I think the suitable followup to this is the Richard Feldman talk, "Why Static Typing Came Back."1 It gives the major reasons why one would prefer one over the other, and makes the case that static types can provide most of the actual benefits of dynamic languages, but the reverse is not true. 1: link to this video
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dansalvatoon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Why Use Pascal?”

I saw a talk that touched on this recently: link to this video He explains that dynamically-typed languages like Python, Ruby, and JS became popular in the 90s because they offered a fast feedback loop for website building, and they didn't need an IDE or compilers, which were slow (and often not free). It ended up not being worth trading your development time for the performance increase when all your users were connecting via 56k modem anyway. The talk makes a lot of other cool points about how development has changed in the past decade or two, and why the trend is moving back to static typing.
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raphlinuson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Strong arrows: a new approach to gradual typing”

Yeah, Rich Feldman has a good talk on this, entitled Why Static Typing Came Back1. It makes a good argument that static typing can recover most of the advantages traditionally accounted to dynamic typing. Rapid iteration you can get from incremental compilers, being concise you can get from powerful type inference, etc. Conversely, the advantages of static typing (largely boiling down to increased reliability) cannot easily be captured by dynamically typed languages. Gradual typing, particularly successful by TypeScript, might be an interesting middle ground, or it might just be a reflection of the dynamic history of JS. 1: link to this video
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zogrodeaon Hacker News • Mentions

On “The last days of my type checker for JavaScript”

I believe Dart was originally gradually typed, and then abandoned the gradual typing for strict-typing-by-default? That doesn't quite sound properly type-safe to me although still safer than how Javascript is by default. My only reference is a memory of this talk by Richard Feldman but I might be wrong or misremembering. link to this video
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