This opinion gets tossed around a lot, but I've found the opposite to be true, in part because all projects trend towards becoming an unholy mess as they grow large, so being able to accomplish a goal in significantly fewer lines of code has tangible benefits.

If there actually is a correlation between high level languages and "trouble", it may be just because a high level language lets a less experienced developer (or team of developers) get farther than they otherwise would in some lower level language, i.e. the more cumbersome nature of a lower level language forces you to follow best practices earlier or the whole thing never gets off the ground, while the same sloppy devs + a higher level language might actually get as far as shipping something.

Whether that is ultimately better is debatable, but the problem is more how the tool is being used than something inherent in the tool itself.

> all projects trend towards becoming an unholy mess as they grow large, so being able to accomplish a goal in significantly fewer lines of code has tangible benefits

This is a really good point that I didn't realize before - sure, languages like bash and Lua and Tcl might scale very poorly to large codebases, but because they're more expressive than some other languages (coughjavacough), you might be able to implement the functionality you need without needing a large codebase in the first place.

I hear this opinion a lot. What exactly is the characteristic(s) that is missing from a scripting language? IDE integration? The compile-time checking before running? Seems like these problems largely have solutions these days. With stuff like JSdoc annotations or TypeScript, or Teal in Lua land, language servers for most languages etc, unit testing. They might be solved _better_ in a lot of compiled languages, but it's not like it's the Wild West if you're using a scripting language, and you could argue the more modern design in some of them are a fair trade-off for the native compile checking.

With Typescript you need to add an extra compilation step. With that one can just as well not to embed JavaScript but write in the original language.

Teal has an advantage that the typed language can be translated into Lua at runtime so during development it allows for quick prototyping and adding types when the amount of types becomes substantial. But its type system is less powerful than that of TypeScript.

You can use ts-node to avoid the compilation step with typescript.

Or Deno. But only on the back end.

I do not prefer "scripting", but dynamic typing + poor language design.

There are dyn typed langs with langs with nice designs. I like Ruby and IOScript. All lisp-like languages. And there are several dyn typed fit-for-embedded langs implemented in Rust that are very promising. This is very much my own opinion, I know. But reading the article's "cons of Lua" I immediately remembered my fight with that language.

Personally I prefer typed languages nowadays. The stronger the better, as long as there is good IDE support.

I'm not convinced scripting languages are not suitable for large projects. It's said a lot, but I've never seen proof one way or the other. I suspect unmanageable code-bases derive from uncontrollable project forces, ignorance, or not caring, but not because of the perceived short comings of a scripting language.

Indeed. Unmanageable code bases come from conversations like this between management and developers:

“Look, we need you to implement this feature within the next 24 hours.”

“Based on my scrum analysis, I need about a week to implement it.”

“Sorry, if it’s not done within the next 24 hours, you will be out of a job.”

“OK....”

At which point, we get a hideous rush job. I have seen this happen time and time again. There is no language in the world which isn’t going to be able to force clean, manageable code under these kinds of circumstances, which alas can and do happen too often in the caffeine and work obsessed tech culture.

I recently started working at a place which is like this, and the code really shows it. It really does not matter what language is used, it's not going to very maintainable if written so quickly.

Have you coded with Haskell or Elm? Im confident that re-factoring that mess that surely comes out of the 24h sprint will be re-factorable without too much pain in these languages.

Just a feeling, but coding with them feels like they are refactor-optimized langs.

If you keep having to do 24 hour sprints without refactoring it doesn’t matter.

It's a trade off, I think. A compiled static language forces you to behave a certain way at the expense of flexibility/expressiveness, script languages are more flexible, but in a way that is easier to acquire technical debt that might be harder to move away from (IMO).

People do not seems to have any trouble producing unreadable and unmaintainable code in statically-typed compiled languages.

Not at all, but having been on the "dynamically typed spaghetti code with very obscure paths/interactions and no test coverage" refactor wagon, I would take a statically typed option any day.

Indeed the quality to look for is strong typed, not statically typed.

Strong typed code is much easier to refactor.

Unfortunately this requires some 'buy in' from the managers which means that many programs are integer/string typed instead of being strongly typed..

I'm sure with time, the dynlang prototype phase -> static in production will be the norm.

Gradual typing has been improving (might not be the only way but still)

Yes, the problem with strong static typing in many languages is that you have to make decisions about typing at exactly the worst time (at the beginning), while you almost never know up front exactly what you need.

For me the ideal would be a language with the expressiveness and fast dev times of Python, and then type information would be collected from actually running the program during development and would gradually shift from auto-generated type hints to more concrete type declarations that could be enforced but that would also assist in compilation & optimization.

I've read people saying they do that in 70s 80s 90s.. it's probably an unavoidable phenomenon of solution space exploration. Even car makers use gradually more precise models before selling something.

The type gathering from use would be nice.

I find that, with a good IDE, the expressiveness of some typed langs matches that of dyn typed langs. You write a bit more code (the types) when using a typed lang, but you write a bit less tests (the stand-in for types dyn langs offer) and your IDE takes care of many of your type signatures.

The fast dev times, as in quick "edit -> run -> try" loops, it what I find most attractive of the dyn langs nowadays. And gradual typing might be a way to get there, although I think it is not needed (some strong typed langs have decent hot code reload).