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Discussion on: Why learn... a statically typed language?

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David Wickes

Oddly enough, I think that we're seeing more of a return to static typing at the moment. The best evidence I have for this is the turn that's happened in the last few years from Ruby towards Rust / Go.

A few years back the Ruby community was flooded with Java developers 'escaping' to a simpler world. And it was simpler and more powerful - Ruby's reflection and type coercion makes a lot of dumb tasks a lot quicker. And you never have to compile it! What could be better?

Fast forward a few years and now all those Ruby developers are 'escaping' to Go (and Rust). All the benefits of static typing that they've been missing in Ruby are available, but now the compiler is fast and the tooling is amazing.

I think the future is going to be languages with ways of checking correctness built in, and explicit typing (and type checking) is going to be a part of that. But who knows.