I’ve seen some variation of this accusation being thrown around for years- and frequently by people who I regard as smart, capable developers. On the other hand, having worked with languages all over the spectrum of static typing- I’ve also seen first how how high the bar really is for benefiting from static types before you hit diminishing returns.
The best answer I can come up with is that people just seem to have differently wired brains. For me, static typing- even fairly sophisticated static typing, is simple. It makes the code simpler, easier to reason about, easier to refactor, and with a sufficiently expressive type system it lets you build things in a much more intuitive way than you could otherwise. It’s not about solving puzzles for the sake of them- types remove a big part of the puzzle by letting me explicitly write things down- and letting the compiler keep track of the details.
Certainly plenty of people don’t see it that way, and I’ve heard a lot of people make similar arguments about dynamic typing being simpler and more expressive. I don’t think they are lying but I see a big pile of inscrutable pain when I work in large dynamically types codebases.
I know I’m right about my experience, and I trust other people are right about theirs, so there must be some significant divide in how we conceptualize code that makes one persons elegant simplicity another’s intolerable complexity.
The best answer I can come up with is that people just seem to have differently wired brains. For me, static typing- even fairly sophisticated static typing, is simple. It makes the code simpler, easier to reason about, easier to refactor, and with a sufficiently expressive type system it lets you build things in a much more intuitive way than you could otherwise. It’s not about solving puzzles for the sake of them- types remove a big part of the puzzle by letting me explicitly write things down- and letting the compiler keep track of the details.
Certainly plenty of people don’t see it that way, and I’ve heard a lot of people make similar arguments about dynamic typing being simpler and more expressive. I don’t think they are lying but I see a big pile of inscrutable pain when I work in large dynamically types codebases.
I know I’m right about my experience, and I trust other people are right about theirs, so there must be some significant divide in how we conceptualize code that makes one persons elegant simplicity another’s intolerable complexity.