> * Types are expensive and dont tend to pay off on spikey/experimental/MVP code, most of which gets thrown away.
This is what people say, but I don't think it's correct. What is correct is that say, ten to twenty years ago, all the statically typed languages had other unacceptable drawbacks and "types bad" became a shorthand for these issues.
I'm talking about C (nonstarter for obvious reasons), C++ (a huge mess, footguns, very difficult, presumably requires a cmake guy), Java (very restrictive, slow iteration and startups, etc.). Compared to those just using Python sounds decent.
Nowadays we have Go and Rust, both of which are pretty easy to iterate in (for different reasons).
> Nowadays we have Go and Rust, both of which are pretty easy to iterate in (for different reasons).
It's common for Rust to become very difficult to iterate in.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40172033
I think Java was the main one. C/C++ are (relatively) close to the metal, system-level languages with explicit memory management - and were tacitly accepted to be the "complicated" ones, with dynamic typing not really applicable at that level.
But Java was the high-level, GCed, application development language - and more importantly, it was the one dominating many university CS studies as an education language before python took that role. (Yeah, I'm grossly oversimplifying - sincere apologies to the functional crowd! :) )
The height of the "static typing sucks!" craze was more like a "The Java type system sucks!" craze...
For me it was more the “java can’t easily process strings” craze that made it impractical to use for scripts or small to medium projects.
Not to mention boilerplate BS.
Recently, Java has improved a lot on these fronts. Too bad it’s twenty-five years late.