[melvinroest]

> it never seemed really practical.

IMO this is partially true but that's mostly because not enough people are working on it. If Pharo would have as much people working on it as Python, it'd be practical really quickly.

> Maybe what I was missing the most was static/explicit typing

I actually have a talk where you can hack typing in. To be fair, it will be checked during execution, so it's not a compile time thing. It's somewhere around here (I did like 3 mini talks in one mini talks, it was pure chaos, haha [1]). It's about 5 min., the whole talk.

Personally, I'm a fan of type hints, but ultimately engineering culture and standardization is more important. Or at least, in a professional context, in a personal code context I like dynamic typing and when it gets too big, I refactor it to explicit typing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeFrt-kdvms&t=2270s