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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What? Why not? I know people who pretty much use the REPL (GHCi) as their primary method of developing in Haskell.
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'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).
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.
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.
C# added "dynamic" keyword in 4.0.
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.
def lookup(name: String): Any
myObj.lookup("foo")
myObj.foo
But both of them are about type inference, not dynamic types.
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.
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.
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.
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.