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Comment by unlinker | Hacker News Reader

Why is strong/dynamic typing considered such a big deal?

Two main reasons:

1. You can detect very common errors (e.g. typos) at compile-time instead of maybe detecting them at run-time. This makes the code much much more reliable (or equivalently you don't need to do nearly as much testing).

2. Dynamic typing prevents IDEs from doing extremely useful things like real code completion and symbol renaming.

If you're thinking "but I edit Javascript with code completion" or "code completion isn't such a big deal" then it's probably because you've never used accurate code completion, e.g. Microsoft's Intellisense for C++, or pretty much an Java IDE.

There are ways to deal with that in dynamically typed languages.

1) Common Lisp implementation use a compiler to detect typos, etc.

    CL-USER 21 > (defun bar () (fo0))
    BAR

    CL-USER 22 > (compile *)

    The following function is undefined:
    FO0 which is referenced by BAR

2) In Common Lisp one can ask the running Lisp system for information about classes, symbols, functions, etc.

The use cases for renaming are also completely different. If you take for example a Java class and you want to rename an attribute and update the getter/setters you might want to use a 'tool'. In a dynamically typed language like Common Lisp, this is often not necessary because code generation is widely used and changes can be propagate that way.

0. Performance. 3. Interface documentation.

Also static types tell the machine what is supposed to happen next, and always. Dynamic types represent possibilities that have to be maintained as open until they become commitments that have to be remembered. Static types are certainties that come as orders. Dynamic typing is like being in love, Static typing is like being in the Army.

(disclaimer, I have never been in the Army or any military force and the above post is based on my imagination and watching films)

The way that I see it is that it's a factor that is very much in the front and center of how a developer usually uses the language and their preference tends to fall out of the mentality in how they're writing their code. A static-strongly typed language will pretty much always take more time to write, you have to be a bit more methodical in what you're writing because sometimes changing one thing means changing types in function signatures and variables in a few dozen different places in your code. On the other hand the dynamic-weakly typed languages you can definitely iterate faster, but that can mean that large projects can end up being less maintainable in the future because you don't usually have a type checker to tell you you're passing an array to a function that is expecting a map/object and you end up needing more unit tests and the like to know that your code isn't going to crash in production.

Neither approach is wrong, but most developers have (sometimes very strong) opinions on which is the right way to do it in various different cases.

> that can mean that large projects can end up being less maintainable in the future because you don't usually have a type checker

That's not true if you seriously unit-test your code base, which you should in both cases.

And why do people conflate them so? Python is strongly typed by any reasonable definition, but it's also dynamically typed. To contrast, I've heard C described as weakly, statically typed.

Strong typing is awesome. I personally think that dynamic typing is wonderful, too, but opinions vary about that.

It's totally not. You totally never see anyone talking about it, anywhere.

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