Re:Ask HN: Are there senior devs who liked switching from st...
by MarquesMa on Sunday June 19, 2022 @10:19PM
(#31805638)
Me: dynamic -> static
What did I feel during the transition: Feel like an insulted because of the under-expressiveness. Everyday I find some ideas that are natural to me and non-tech people couldn't be codified directly.
Although statically typed languages are getting better each year, I still think there's a trade-off among three camps:
1. Dynamic (Ruby, JavaScript)
2. Under-expressive static (Java, C#)
3. Expressive static (Scala, TypeScript)
I worked on a full-stack project and people have different backgrounds and have to switch from time to time, here's my impression:
- Most "underexpressive-static -> dynamic" people hate dynamic programming, because they mostly lose typing for nothing - they usually don't leverage the expressiveness because that is how they were coding all along.
- Some "dynamic -> underexpressive-static" people liked the discipline, while some hated the under-expressiveness, it depends.
- The "Expressive static" was the new thing. Everybody need to learn some part. Usually, there's a learning curve, some people like the challenge while some people hate it. That also depends on how steep the curve is (TypeScript is very smooth but not Scala).
Even though I think it's still trade-off, I can see the balance is shifting toward the "expressive static" camp:
- People get more familiar when they're exposed to the concepts. Higher-order functions like map/filter/reduce were considered exotic in the 90s, but now they're everywhere. Monadic-like programming like Promise or Optional is also popularized, they're not hard at all once "everybody else" learned that. Advanced type systems are no different.
- Language creators have more experience in choosing trade-offs that makes sense. Scala was getting a bad rap during its day, but Kotlin didn't. In other words, the creators are getting better at spending their "novelty budgets"[0] to yield optimal results.
P.S. I still couldn't wrap my head that Dart spent NO "novelty budget" whatsoever... They have zero chance against TypeScript if there was no Flutter or other Google platforms that use Dart.
What did I feel during the transition: Feel like an insulted because of the under-expressiveness. Everyday I find some ideas that are natural to me and non-tech people couldn't be codified directly.
Although statically typed languages are getting better each year, I still think there's a trade-off among three camps:
1. Dynamic (Ruby, JavaScript)
2. Under-expressive static (Java, C#)
3. Expressive static (Scala, TypeScript)
I worked on a full-stack project and people have different backgrounds and have to switch from time to time, here's my impression:
- Most "underexpressive-static -> dynamic" people hate dynamic programming, because they mostly lose typing for nothing - they usually don't leverage the expressiveness because that is how they were coding all along.
- Some "dynamic -> underexpressive-static" people liked the discipline, while some hated the under-expressiveness, it depends.
- The "Expressive static" was the new thing. Everybody need to learn some part. Usually, there's a learning curve, some people like the challenge while some people hate it. That also depends on how steep the curve is (TypeScript is very smooth but not Scala).
Even though I think it's still trade-off, I can see the balance is shifting toward the "expressive static" camp:
- People get more familiar when they're exposed to the concepts. Higher-order functions like map/filter/reduce were considered exotic in the 90s, but now they're everywhere. Monadic-like programming like Promise or Optional is also popularized, they're not hard at all once "everybody else" learned that. Advanced type systems are no different.
- Language creators have more experience in choosing trade-offs that makes sense. Scala was getting a bad rap during its day, but Kotlin didn't. In other words, the creators are getting better at spending their "novelty budgets"[0] to yield optimal results.
P.S. I still couldn't wrap my head that Dart spent NO "novelty budget" whatsoever... They have zero chance against TypeScript if there was no Flutter or other Google platforms that use Dart.
[0] https://shimweasel.com/2018/08/25/novelty-budgets