Just in case anyone is reading the blogs in a hurry, keep in mind that neither the Dmitri Sotnikov nor the post he mentioned by Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert actually try to refute Elben Shira's carefully worded prediction: "This is my bet: the age of dynamic languages is over. There will be no new successful ones."
Instead of making a case for "new successful dynamic languages" and why such new ones would emerge, both authors are defending the existing benefits of today's dynamic languages.
Elben Shira is saying that he predicts the next wave of successful languages will have static checking but also look & feel like a "dynamic" one made possible by smarter compiler technologies such as type inferencing. (Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert also mentions the new Crystal language as an example of this.)
If one is itemizing all the great points of Python/Ruby/Javascript, that's orthogonal to what Shira is betting on.
Oh definitely think the prediction is absurd. I didn't realize it wasn't obvious from my post.
The problem I outline is not that static typing involves additional boilerplate. It's the inherent additional cognitive load it introduces. A smarter compiler isn't going to help you there.
The fallacy of Elben's argument is in the assumption that there will be only advances in the field of static typing.
Meanwhile, people working with dynamic languages are improving their tools at an astonishing pace. For example, working with an editor like Cursive provides many refactoring options you could only expect from a static language a few years ago.
The biggest benefit though comes from interactivity though. Dynamic languages lend themselves extremely well to providing live coding environments. This allows for tools like the REPL and things like Figwheel https://github.com/bhauman/lein-figwheel and this kind workflow will be difficult to match for static languages.
It's obvious you think it's absurd and given your heavy involvement in Clojure, your reaction is not unexpected. But you are still not addressing the main claim of the articles (that no new dynamically typed language will ever emerge again and be successful) and also missing why statically typed languages have won (it's not just correctness guarantees, it's also the automatic refactorings they enable, which are impossible to achieve with dynamically typed languages, and performance).
Clojure and its family of language will be a thing of the past in a few years from now (Clojure is not even a thing of the present actually, given its minuscule mind share on the JVM).
Elixir (and Erlang itself, actually) are definitely the vanguard of dynamically typed languages at the moment. I think this is because they aren't just convenient to write "normal" code in (like Ruby, Python, JS, etc.), they also come with major advantages in writing concurrent and distributed code, which is increasingly important. BEAM is also a particularly good runtime with better performance (especially memory) characteristics than many of its dynamically typed competitors.
I think this is the counter-argument to the original claim; new dynamically typed languages can be successful by offering convenience for important functionality. Even so, I think type annotations to aid static analysis (which Elixir has and JS will likely have in the future) will be an important feature.
I think the bar has simply been raised for new languages with both static and dynamic type systems. The former can no longer be boilerplate-y, inflexible, and inconvenient, and the latter can no longer be statically uncertain and hard to reason about. This is a good thing.
I am addressing the main claim of the article quite clearly. Static typing adds complexity and there's no evidence that the added complexity results in any tangible benefits.
Therefore, my prediction is that dynamic typing isn't going anywhere unless some empirical evidence appears that clearly demonstrates the advantages of static typing. Seeing how long static typing has been around I wouldn't hold my breath on that.
If you think that static languages have won then you must live in a very special bubble seeing how pretty much all of the web runs on JavaScript.
Having such strong convictions in absence of any empirical evidence is simply faith and static typing seems to just be a religious experience for some people. Many advocates are like bible thumpers coming to your door and telling you to accept monads into your heart. Naturally these are the loudest elements of the community who live in their own little echo chamber.
I liked your article and generally think you have lots of good thoughts, so I want to give you some color on why I think you're getting downvoted here (though I didn't downvote you), so that you don't just think it is because of "bible thumpers".
You seem to be missing that jasod's claim was that the "main claim of the article" is "that he predicts the next wave of successful languages will have static checking but also look & feel like a "dynamic" one made possible by smarter compiler technologies such as type inferencing." You haven't said anything in this thread about "the next wave of successful languages" one way or the other.
> If you think that static languages have won then you must live in a very special bubble seeing how pretty much all of the web runs on JavaScript.
That's true, but has nothing to do with the claim about "the next wave of successful languages" because javascript is clearly part of the last wave (or really, the one before).
You seem to be arguing (in an increasingly heated tone) a broader point (which may be right or wrong) in a thread attempting to focus on a more narrow one.
I'm certainly not aware of any. Pretty much all statically typed languages use the REPL as a toy on the side. It's not part of the actual development process. You're not running the REPL in the actual app you're working on and its usefulness is extremely marginal at that point.
A language like Haskell pretty much precludes having REPL integration as you can't just run any top level expression without going through the main.
Well, are you aware that the same Haskell you cite has a REPL environment, with on the fly code patching, and that does not require all expressions to "go throught main" anyway, right?
I simply have no idea how anyone would use a REPL to do main development (I never liked the idea anyway). I use it just for early stage testing and debugging assistance, just like I do in Python, Lisp, Prolog... and certainly not Perl - this one has a useless REPL.
Let me give you an example of my typical day working with Clojure. I will start the app then connect my IDE to its instance. When I work on any code I write it in the context of the running application. I have access to all the state that's been built up, I can leverage user sessions, database connections etc.
Let's say I'm writing an endpoint to serve some data to the client. I would go to my db namespace, write the function to query the db, run the code and see what it's doing. I'll modify and run it until it does what I want. Then I might go write a controller and do the same thing, and so on.
At each point I have my code running within the context of the app, anything I write in the editor can be evaluated modified, and inspected.
This workflow simply doesn't exist in Haskell last I checked.
I'm not aware of any simple way to get up and running like you are describing in Haskell, no. But it's unclear whether you are saying that such a thing cannot exist in a statically typed language, or whether it just does not at the moment. Can you clarify?
In case of Haskell it's due to the fact that you can't just evaluate any top level form without going through the main. I'm sure it would be possible to design a statically typed language that's REPL development friendly, but none exist currently.
Ok, I either don't get what you are saying, or you never really tried Haskell's REPL for real.
I've probably run most of the modules I've written in Haskell on the REPL, normally without importing the main one, because I use it for early-stage testing. I've run DB interfaces, network abstractions, and, of course, lots and lots of pure stuff. Just like you describe doing for Clojure.
Ok, I don't use an IDE that run stuff automatically at the REPL. On Haskell I import the interesting module, and run it. There is at least one IDE that connects with ghci, but I don't like it, and don't know how far it takes debuging (at a minimum, it evaluates your code and tells you the type of anything - I've tried this).
This is simply misinformed. GHCI can evaluate/run the IO monad. Syntax: to run and throw away the result, simply type an expression with type IO a: it will be evaluated to IO a, then executed. If GHCI can show values in a, it will (unless a=()). To get the value, say var <- expr.
People create languages all the time. Some languages (like PHP) were just created for problems that the creators had, not for some overriding empirical reason. Dynamic languages also tend to be easier to make. There's nothing to suggest people will stop creating languages and then adopting them, when they are tailored toward specific problems. Any reasoning as to why they might not appear is hand waving for attention.
Reread the article. It doesn't say such language will not emerge (I certainly hope people keep creating languages all the time), it says they will not be successful.
I'd rate Elixir right now only as "up-and-coming". It is not yet an acceptable second-tier choice. Even in an environment where Ruby or Python (or the several other similar second-tier languages) are accepted without a second thought (as opposed to an environment where only first-tiers like Java or C(#/++/) are acceptable), Elixir will still result in some questions being asked that you better have a good answer for.
This is not a criticism of the language, simply descriptive of its current position. Go, which is substantially larger at the moment from what I can see, is just barely cracking that boundary that I described, and probably still has a good year or two before it's quite there.
Elixir is currently on a good trajectory, but I would definitely be concerned that trying to be a Ruby on top of the Erlang VM is going to make it a non-trivial challenge to get to the next level of usage, precisely because the Ruby space is covered, covered, and covered again with mature, existing languages. This is, again, not a promise from me it can't succeed, indeed I wish it all the best, just a description of its challenges. It is growing rapidly in its little niche but it may have a serious challenge getting to the next level.
And, back on topic, when this came up on Reddit, I'd observe that Elixir is the only dynamically-typed "up-and-coming" language I can think of. Nim is statically-typed. Rust is static. Go is probably on the way out of "up-and-coming" but it's static.
I also observe that all the dynamic languages are all adding static type support, even when the static type support is inevitably compromised by the dynamic portion of the language. In the meantime, I don't see any static language trying to move in a dynamic direction... in fact, many of the static languages are moving to be even more static! The net flow of feature work right now is strongly in the static direction.
Point. And it's a non-trivial implementation, from the look of it. A lot of static languages have "a thing that can be passed around as a 'dynamic' value but has to be cast back to a static type to do anything", but the C# feature is much more than that.
Also, I observe on the docs page this little note that says "As of Scala 2.10, defining direct or indirect subclasses of this trait is only possible if the language feature 'dynamics' is enabled."
Almost all the static languages have some sort of dynamic feature already, and generally have since day one. The mere existence of "dynamic" features isn't my point. The question is, how often are they used, and is the language tending towards more of them or less of them? I don't do Scala, so I can't speak to it, but does every little Scala program use this dynamic package, or is it something rarely reached for, and even perhaps considered a code smell by the community? If it's the latter, then it's not a huge notch in the "dynamic" belt.
I'm discussing the first derivative, not the current state of the world.
I don't think it's considered a code smell, but it is intended to be used only for cases where the problem your modelling really is dynamic. Basically, in cases where you end up having classes that have methods like
def lookup(name: String): Any
you can instead use Dynamic, meaning instead of having calls like this:
myObj.lookup("foo")
you can do this:
myObj.foo
So no, Scala isn't really trying to become more dynamic, but it has a feature for dealing with problems that are dynamic anyway.
Erlang is reliable because it's fault tolerant. The Strong Static Typing camp wants software that is reliable because it is faultless.
Elixir has Erlang's philosophy on the problem. I think most of the wailing and gnashing of teeth is because most languages (even most statically typed ones historically) have just completely punted on the notion of language support for writing software that doesn't fall over in a stiff breeze. The more we build layers of software between humans and their actual goals the more this is going to come to a head.
And you are falling prey to the Nirvana fallacy [1].
Yes, we will never be able to prove that a program is 100% correct but that doesn't mean we shouldn't prefer solutions that bring that number up (statically typed languages) over solutions that don't (dynamically typed languages).
Just because you can't do something perfectly doesn't mean you shouldn't try to do it as best you can.
Yes. Real-world programming is an entirely different thing from academic research.
In the real world, it may well be the case that while you're screwing around with a baroque type system, your competition has iterated three or four times and your milkshake has been drunk.
Of course your compiler will never be able to proof the correctness (or lack of it) of all programs.
The relevant question is, what share of useful programs can our compilers help us creating? This is not answered yet, and you seem to have never even thought about it.
fun fact: the Busy Beaver function applied to the universe yields a finite number and seeing as we need to leave some space to actually run the program we can conclude that in fact any program that can be written can be proven to halt. Granted that in case of "for(;;){printf("hello");}" that halt is the heat death of the universe but it's still theoretically tractable.
Instead of making a case for "new successful dynamic languages" and why such new ones would emerge, both authors are defending the existing benefits of today's dynamic languages.
Elben Shira is saying that he predicts the next wave of successful languages will have static checking but also look & feel like a "dynamic" one made possible by smarter compiler technologies such as type inferencing. (Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert also mentions the new Crystal language as an example of this.)
If one is itemizing all the great points of Python/Ruby/Javascript, that's orthogonal to what Shira is betting on.