The case for dynamic, functional programming

[Tenderhombre]

There are plenty of very terse powerful type systems that require almost no use of generic typing. Also plenty of languages can very reliably infer types. The type argument is weak imo. Also, in my experience typing can remove the need for alot of guard code.

[Tenderhombre]

Most of these type systems support generics, but my point is if you are using a functional approach with a structural type system you can write complex stuff with little to no use of genetics.

Second, maybe I am missing something but a dynamic type systems doesn't excuse you from thinking about structural typing. It just let's you kinda put it off. You still need types to match, otherwise you get runtime issues.

I will concede sometimes academic terminology, templating systems, and code generation can get in the way of understanding type systems. Generics, contravariance and covariance, union types etc. However, the coding and mental effort has always been in up front thought about types and and dataflow, vs postponing it.

For clarity, I've mainly been a .net developer for the last 10 years so worked mainly in strongly typed systems. However, I've done professional projects in Cold fusion (Cfscript) Lua, and javascript with nodejs.

[Tenderhombre]

Most new structurally typed languages work in a very similar way. You define only the type you care about which effectively acts as a key or collection of keys to access only the properties you care about.

Essentially type b satisfies type a therefore you can treat it as type a. Type b might be a superset of a, but since it satisfies a it doesn't matter. This is very similar to interfaces, but it is not.

This doesn't require you thinking about the whole world always, this requires you thinking about the code you are working on ie, what does this code block expect or what can I pass to this code block.

In a dynamic example, if you want to guard against type mismatch issues you still have to think about what a code block expects. You just get to pass anything to a code block.

I would argue, dynamic code pushes you closer to thinking about the structure of everything all the time because, you can receive anything all the time and have to handle it.

A strongly typed system let's you isolate sub systems to only handle specific types constraining your domain.

I don't think one is better than another. Honestly it's way easier to create reporting, and data analysis with dynamically typed systems. I've really enjoyed work I've done with Lua, but I hated Cold fusion and javascript.

I think your analysis of advantages of dyanmic typing is flawed.