It's not a terrible experience, but it is truly baffling that anyone would start a project in it today. A good static type system is too useful and important.
That's the last thing I look for when evaluating a new language.
Well, actually I came to dislike static typing so much that's a big point against languages IMHO. I concede that it would have saved me time with data occasionally going to the wrong argument/method/function but every time I understand that I'll have to type almost useless stuff like Map(<String>,<String>) I hit back and return to HN home page. Moving to dynamic typing was as liberating as moving away from malloc/free to garbage collection.
I think I could stand languages with implicit typing. All I want is not to have to annotate my code. I'm happily paying some time and tests for that.
Btw, I don't like people downvoting to express disagreement so I'm upvoting you. My +1.
> A good static type system is too useful and important.
What? A whole lot of web apps these days are built in Python, Ruby, or JavaScript, none of which are statically typed languages. Do you mean a strong type system?
I assume mean strongly typed and I can agree with them to an extent. While it does add slight overhead when writing code (not enough to matter I think) it does help eliminate a bunch of errors/edge cases you'd have to unit test for in an dynamically typed language.
Though as I always say: use the right tool for the job. And for a lot of jobs dynamically typed languages and framework offer a lot to the developer.
I still do my saas projects all in PHP. I mean, I'm not building NASA control software it anything, but I have incurred very few problems due to dynamic typing. Not to mention the fact that I can hire php devs for half of what a ruby dev wants these days.
