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Re:First chapter of Kernighan and Donovan's new Go book [pdf] by JoeAltmaier on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @10:06AM (#10419180)
I agree. But the industry is hurtling down a tunnel of weak typing and runtime checking. So compiler features are diminishing in relevance at a geometric rate.
Re:First chapter of Kernighan and Donovan's new Go book [pdf] by jerf on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @10:12AM (#10419225)
I see the exact opposite trend happening. Weak typing is plateauing. It's the last moment of apparent strength before long, slow, but inevitable collapse. Most interesting work is being done on the static side right now, partially because there's no more work to be done on the dynamic side. (A great deal of being dynamic is precisely throwing away all the structure you might build further features on.)

You can also see this in how all the dynamic languages are working on adding "optional" or "incremental" dynamic typing. Static languages, by contrast, generally create one dynamic type, stick it in a library somewhere, and let the small handful of people who really need it use it. Few, if any, of them are adding any dynamic features. The motion trends are clear.