Ask HN: How can I get informed in the static vs. dynamic typing debate?

Posted by zingar on Friday November 06, 2026 @05:13AM
from the ask-hn dept.

Static typing has converted a bunch of people I know who started their careers with Ruby's dynamic typing. Nowadays they see static typing as an important guardrail for agent programming.

Clojure programmers are also into agentic programming. I wouldn't have thought it possible but I encounter Clojure people who are even _more_ into agentic programming. Yet Clojureconf is still full of what seem like good points against static typing.

I'd really like to understand this. Where do I start?

( 5 comments | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: How can I get informed in the static vs. dynamic ... by hashim on Friday November 06, 2026 @05:43AM (#50390693)

It seems to me that debate ended - at least in a professional capacity - with the advent of LLMs. Writing code, especially when it comes to tedious boilerplate like types, has been so abstracted away from me nowadays going back to it feels like doing maths without a calculator... or maybe even the old-fashioned human calculators.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How can I get informed in the static vs. dynamic ... by smt88 on Friday November 06, 2026 @05:45AM (#50390714)

Strong typing is not boilerplate-heavy in all languages (ex: TypeScript)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How can I get informed in the static vs. dynamic ... by smt88 on Friday November 06, 2026 @05:45AM (#50390713)

This debate ended a long time ago. Every language is moving toward stronger, static typing, especially JavaScript with TypeScript, but even Python.

I don’t know of any good arguments against strong, static typing. What do you think are some?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How can I get informed in the static vs. dynamic ... by vincent-uden on Friday November 06, 2026 @06:30AM (#50391059)

I feel similarly. At some point in the past, many static type systems were not expressive enough to handle some of the useful strategies available to dynamic type systems.

But nowadays, pretty much all static type systems employ some (or multiple) convenient methods of polymorphism

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Re:Ask HN: How can I get informed in the static vs. dynamic ... by hackermailman on Saturday November 07, 2026 @04:25PM (#50408206)

Robert Harper's books and YouTube lectures at the Oregon PL summer school. He argues dynamic typed languages are really statically typed languages with only one type which is a union/sum type. This means you get 'less expressiveness'.

A great book where the authors specifically point out they can only achieve what they did because of dynamic typing allowing for potentially 'dangerous' operations is Software Design for Flexibility by Sussan & Hanson.

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