Dynamic languages are the future

[David Hopwood]

James Hague wrote:
> On 8/29/06, David Hopwood <david.nospam.hopwood@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
>> Maybe the "next generation", but not the generation after that. My
>> impression is that there are few purely dynamically typed languages being
>> designed any more. Type inference has won the argument. It will just take
>> a while for this to filter through to the mainstream, as it always does.
> 
> I disagree.  Type inference simply prevents you from having to
> manually specify many types.  Indeed, the Erlang compiler already does
> this where it can.  It doesn't magically solve problems like coming up
> with a static type system that can handle dynamically reloading
> modules in live system (without full recompilation) and messages
> between processes.

These problems are in principle already solved for statically typed languages.
Some of them are only solved in research papers (e.g. typing of first-class
messages in <http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~pari/papers/fool2004/first-class_FOOL2004.pdf>),
others in real languages (e.g. open distribution in Alice ML or Acute), but
there are no fundamental obstacles to doing *any* of these "dynamic" things
in a language with static type inference.

-- 
David Hopwood <david.nospam.hopwood@REDACTED>