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Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

If your prejudice prevents you from having a conversation with Matz or Jose Valim or Van Rossom or the creators of Julia about software development, you may want to reconsider your prejudice as a hard and fast rule.

You can't honestly believe no one who likes to develop in a dynamically typed language has nothing interesting to say about software development?

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I can't (or, more accurately, don't) believe that, but I can certainly believe they have nothing interesting to say about the topic of static vs dynamic typing.

I'm very much with you on static typing but you've closed your mind with a slam. Please don't.

An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded.

It is both useful and allowed to have a certain level of belief that won’t be crossed without heavy effort. The OP didn’t even say they were closed to the conversation completely, but that a random person with no pre built trust isn’t going to get the time of day from them to rehash the same settled argument.

"Matz or Jose Valim or Van Rossom or the creators of Julia"

from memory Matz -> ruby, Valim-> elixir, Van Rossum -> python, and 'the creators of Julia' -> julia

Not 'random persons' then

Yea, the OP was referencing randos from his perspective and the responder subbed in famous software developers. They weren’t arguing on the same point

If I have pre-existing respect for someone I will hear them about. But the bar for that conversation is high.

I'm not sure what is worse, loving dynamic languages or having all these pre-existing conditions

Doesn't everyone have those? Like, I'm unlikely to really engage with someone about my health unless they're a doctor or otherwise have some area of expertise. Or if it's just a casual, friendly conversation, to kill some time.

Everyone has biases. But you aren't describing a bias, you are describing a refusal to engage with people below you. Speak for yourself, I don't have that.

We’re all humans and life is very complicated with many facets. If we all looked hard enough I’m sure we could find a person you’d refuse to engage in a debate with over their “thing.”

But that wouldn’t be a wise use of time in my opinion. And that’s what they’re ultimately driving at: we all have limited time to expend, so do it in things that matter to you. I believe “matters to you” is a bias.

"Below you" is a bit of an exaggeration, I think. I said that I might think less of someone as a software engineer if they express an opinion that I think is particularly bad. Hardly egregious, in my opinion. I also might not - it frankly depends a lot on the situation.

idk about the others but much of Guido's development energies the past few years have been spent building Python's gradual static typing system.

These people opinions are based on bad information.

Beliefs inform decisions and other beliefs

I disagree with them on a huge number of fundamental things in software. Most of their fundaments are claims with no evidence. Due to that, I simply do not care about what they have to say most of the time.

Python got type hints bolted on. A type system for Elixir is being worked on. Dynamic typing was a prerequisite for Erlang to enable hot-code-reloading. Julia is can be typed for an extra speedup. Stripe built a type checker for Ruby called Sorbet.

Julia generates fast code without type annotations (except for your data types).

> (except for your data types)

This confused me for a moment, but I think you mean annotating the types of the fields in your `struct`s, right?

An addition to that: any non-constant global variables (if you must have those) should also be type annotated.

To be honest, I think dynamic typing must contain a mind trap. Very smart people fall in.

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