[ht85]

Strongly typed languages have a higher barrier of entry and require an engineering mindset. That's anecdotal but if I think of exceptionally competent people I've worked with on JS projects, all of them have spent time building and advocated for properly typed code bases.

The other camp "just hates it" because it "slows them down", as it seems they spend most of their time fighting the types but never get to the point where you get that huge return on investment.

[psychoslave]

I don't know, the ergonomics of the type system is not the same in all languages. A tool chain that report early useful feedbacks in a non cryptic sentences will certainly gains adoption quickly.

Unfortunately most of the time the result is at best needlessly cryptic, with zero thought about simplicity of use. Ruby has a reputation of taking care of this topic.

[pmontra]

I've been working with types and malloc for years in C, then enter Java. No need to malloc anymore and everything worked. Great, goodbye C. Then enter Ruby, no need to write types anymore and everything worked. Great, goodbye Java.

That's the great picture. Looking into the details I've been working with Perl, JavaScript, Python plus many other less common languages. I always had a preference for languages that hide complexity away from me.

Code completion really doesn't matter much to me. I've been working for maybe ten years with an emacs package that remembered words and attempted to autocomplete with the most used suffix. It worked surprisingly well.

[simoncion]

In my professional experience, types are a godsend for large, and/or long-running projects that have been worked on by many people over the years. They reduce complexity by informing you up-front of the shape of the data and/or objects that a function demands and produces.

If the type-checking system is decent, they also automatically catch a whole class of problems that will only show up at runtime, and may take years to surface. (Ask me about the error-handing code that detonated because it contained a typo in a Ruby class name, which was only discovered three years after it was introduced... when that code was actually exercised during an... exciting outage of a system it depended on.)

[pjm331]

> Strongly typed languages have a higher barrier of entry

Agreed

> the other camp "just hates it" because it "slows them down"

I’ve no doubt there are some that fall into this category, but not everyone, not by a long shot.