The other day I was invited to participate in the podcast of Nación Lumpen about the flaming topic Dynamic Typing vs. Static Typing. Luis Osa and I were there to argue in favor of dynamic typing, from Python and JavaScript perspectives respectively.
My first impression after the podcast was that we were not at the level to defend dynamic languages properly and I ended very surprised about the modern features of static typed languages.
Lots of things were told during the conversation and, in my opinion, lots of reasons arose to make static typed languages shine over dynamic ones. After 700 km of highway, I’ve got to sort my ideas and conclusions about the podcast. This is a long post, so be prepared!
Types are meaning
From the bare metal perspective, types are nothing. The pure hardware executing the programs in our devices understand only about memory addresses and data sizes. It does not perform any type-checking before running the assembly code, once the code it’s loaded, it’s on its own.
You start introducing types to mean something. Consider simple types in C: they are all about data sizes (int, word, byte), formats (float, double, pointer) and access (const) but you’re helping the compiler to create better target code: memory efficient, faster and safer. In addition, C gives us ways to combine simpler types into complex ones as well by using DEFINE macros and structured types. C is able to calculate each size, format and access type of the new abstraction preventing us from accessing invalid fields of a record or using them in incorrect places but, in addition, C makes new names to be charged with unique meaning (i.e two structures differing only in the name of the structure are actually different types) so we can abuse this feature to create abstract relationships.
This is what I think when talking about types. Types are (or at least, add) meaning. You use types as a way to perform a classification of data, to label some properties that some set of values should have and to establish relationships with other types.
Uno + uno = diez 