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Re:Python 3.12 by winter_blue on Monday October 02, 2023 @03:51PM (#37743543)
I’m talking from my real-life lived experience with dynamic typing. Dynamic typing is truly harmful for any software projective involving complex logic, or for collaborative team project (where there’s more than 1 person working on the code), or for any large project (even only one person is working on it). It was truly a waste of time to have to read piles of code code, use a debugger and inspect object structure, to understand how some parts of certain large codebases. Dynamic typing is simply horrible for team collaboration, code readability (and ease of understanding), and it results in a large number of bugs that could easily have been eliminated with static type checking.

> so not really any point in trying to convince you

You’re right about that, but I take a stronger position on this than for example something very subjective like curly braces versus white space indentation. I am indeed very dogmatic and take a hard-line on this. To the point that I’ll say this: dynamic typing is simply a wrong and bad engineering decision.

Another example of a bad thing is allowing null to be a part of every type instead of requiring an explicit ? in the type, or the use of an Optional wrapper — and this is something any modern languages — to name a few Rust, Kotlin, etc fixes. But that isn’t meant to level a personal attack against the languages designers of the past (or to say that they were stupid). Allowing every type to be Union[T, null] was a simply a language design mistake (that potentially cost us billions) that we need to rectify and move forward from.

However, imo, dynamic typing is a 100 times worse than not having null safety (or not having memory safety like C or C++). I can work with a C or C++ without much trouble, but not with dynamic typing. Dynamic typing is simply just inexcusably horrid.

Re:Python 3.12 by schrodingerscow on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @11:55AM (#37753574)
Ha you sound exactly like my own consciousness. There are few things in life I feel as resolute about than this one. Dynamic types were a mistake. Let’s learn and move on. I often joke that if null pointer references were the billion dollar mistake (or whatever it’s called), dynamic typing was the 100 billion dollar mistake. And we’re still living with it but thank god for typescript etc for saving us finally
Re:Python 3.12 by winter_blue on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @08:42PM (#37759530)
Thanks. Yeah, I agree.