I don’t think you need a “formal education” to see the benefits of strong typing. Whether someone is attracted to it or not probably has more to do with their specific use case.
Strongly typed languages is simply a trade off where you get peace of mind by paying for it with extra time and effort spent. For some people that’s a no-brainer and for some people that’s just something that gets in the way.
My background is mostly in sysops and monitoring, and for me types are a life-saver because I value stability and predictability over almost anything else. If my job was something more similar to “ship new stuff fast” I’m not sure that would be the case.
I agree it's a trade off but for me the ratio of effort spent/effort saved in lack of bugs and peace of minds is like 1/1000. Such a tiny bit of effort for huge payback in effort/mental energy saved.
> If my job was something more similar to “ship new stuff fast”
Ironically, the slowest moving codebase I have ever seen was written in Python. It was impossible to "ship new stuff fast" without breaking things. I think Python works up to a certain size/complexity level, then it completely falls apart.
Yes; I've come to realize the yarn "Internal quality and productivity rise and fall together" is more true than I ever thought. And with python, (and IME most dynamically typed languages), the internal quality has far more ways to go awry.
1. Python is very strongly typed, every single item has a clearly defined type. That said, it is dynamically typed, meaning that the variables are not a "containers" for predefined types, but simply labels on objects.
2. What brings benefits is not static typing itself, but static analysis which is mandatory in most statically typed languages (i.e. the program won't compile/interpret if the analysis breaks). With tools like mypy Python has a perfectly capable static analysis - even without any type annotations, although they massively improve it - it's just not mandatory and the program will happily run even if it fails.
Strongly typed languages is simply a trade off where you get peace of mind by paying for it with extra time and effort spent. For some people that’s a no-brainer and for some people that’s just something that gets in the way.
My background is mostly in sysops and monitoring, and for me types are a life-saver because I value stability and predictability over almost anything else. If my job was something more similar to “ship new stuff fast” I’m not sure that would be the case.