Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by hardboiled | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

hardboiled

Disagree about the idea that those who are unfamiliar with type theory prefer dynamic typing.

Typing preferences are usually due to trends in language usage having little to do with knowledge.

Plenty of java programmers use static typing without ever having to understand type theory.

But looking to history of language designers/implementers

Dan Friedman

Gilad Bracha http://www.infoq.com/presentations/functional-pros-cons

Guy Steele

Rich Hickey

All of these guys have worked on static languages, have a keener understanding of type theory than most, and yet they seem to promote dynamic languages at least when it comes to their pet languages.

View on HN

I'm not disagreeing with you (that a lot of people go with what's trendy or what they already know), but I wouldn't put Gilad Bracha in the list of knowledgeable people. I've seen the talk you are linking to and it's not very impressive... he sounds mostly whiny to me. In his own blog, when he writes about about functional programming or type theory, he gets called out by the people who really know about it.

I would agree, I don't see why Gilad Bracha is on that list.

Gilad Bracha has no idea what the hell he's talking about.

Rich hasn't worked on static languages and I'm not familiar with him having done anything in type theory. He wanted a nicer, practical Lisp first and foremost. A helpful compiler wasn't high on his list of priorities.

Guy Steele's most recent work has involved functional, statically typed programming languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(programming_language)

One of Friedman's most recent books http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTML/ was on ML which is a statically typed, functional programming language.

The smart people that weren't using static types back in the 70s and 80s weren't using them because the statically typed languages available back then were fuckin' awful except for ML and Miranda.

We can do a lot better as programmers these days. Stop giving yourself an excuse to not learn new things.

FWIW, I don't think the diagram is claiming that people who are unfamiliar with type theory tend to prefer dynamic typing, rather that people who prefer dynamic typing tend to be unfamiliar with type theory.

The most useful takeaway from that graph is the insight into how many type theory aficionados look at the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com