Re:Ask HN: Will front end development ever move away from Ja...
by chubot on Sunday March 12, 2017 @02:16PM
(#13852110)
Yes I totally believe that part of the static vs. dynamic debate is different use cases.
However I will point out that probably 80% of the world's top websites are written in dynamic languages -- Wikipedia, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube, Reddit, etc. (that's not even counting the JavaScript.)
So there is something about that use case and dynamic languages... That's not to say a language is great because it's used widely. But it means that it must be getting something right, and not doing other things too badly.
So yeah all I'm saying is that there's a tradeoff. If there's was no tradeoff, then it would have never have swung toward dynamic languages in the 90's/2000's. It's not like we didn't have statically typed languages before the web. But things swung that way, and it sounds like they're swinging back, with PHP, Python, and JavaScript all getting optional types in one way or another.
However I will point out that probably 80% of the world's top websites are written in dynamic languages -- Wikipedia, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube, Reddit, etc. (that's not even counting the JavaScript.)
So there is something about that use case and dynamic languages... That's not to say a language is great because it's used widely. But it means that it must be getting something right, and not doing other things too badly.
So yeah all I'm saying is that there's a tradeoff. If there's was no tradeoff, then it would have never have swung toward dynamic languages in the 90's/2000's. It's not like we didn't have statically typed languages before the web. But things swung that way, and it sounds like they're swinging back, with PHP, Python, and JavaScript all getting optional types in one way or another.