I agree. Here in 2024, I hope everyone agrees that types are great.
Static types, aren't just verbose, they're clunky. They only work in a perfect world - dynamic types provide the functionality to actually thrive.
> I sometimes wonder whether something more in the Rust spirit where the tools are smart enough not to waste your time might be more successful.
That could help, the problem being XML. You mention the J2EE framework and semi-documented "standards" - the world is rife with bad xml implementations, buggy xml implementations, and bad programmers reading 1 GB xml documents into memory (or programs needing to be re-worked to support a SAX parser).
There's too much baggage at the feet of XML, and the tools that maybe could have helped were always difficult to use/locked behind (absurdly expensive) proprietary paywalls.
JSON started to achieve popularity because as a format, it was relatively un-encumbered. Its biggest tie was to Javascript - if certain tools hadn't been brain-dead about rejecting JSON that wasn't strictly just JSON, it might have achieved same level of type safety as schema-validated XML, without much of the cruft. But that's not what the tools did, and so JSON became a (sort-of) human-readable data-interchange format, with no validation.
So in 2024 we have no good data-x-change formats, just random tools in little niches that make life better in your chosen poison format. We await a rust - a good format with speed, reliability, interoperability, extensibility, and easy-to-use tools/libraries built in.
Static types, aren't just verbose, they're clunky. They only work in a perfect world - dynamic types provide the functionality to actually thrive.
> I sometimes wonder whether something more in the Rust spirit where the tools are smart enough not to waste your time might be more successful.
That could help, the problem being XML. You mention the J2EE framework and semi-documented "standards" - the world is rife with bad xml implementations, buggy xml implementations, and bad programmers reading 1 GB xml documents into memory (or programs needing to be re-worked to support a SAX parser).
There's too much baggage at the feet of XML, and the tools that maybe could have helped were always difficult to use/locked behind (absurdly expensive) proprietary paywalls.
JSON started to achieve popularity because as a format, it was relatively un-encumbered. Its biggest tie was to Javascript - if certain tools hadn't been brain-dead about rejecting JSON that wasn't strictly just JSON, it might have achieved same level of type safety as schema-validated XML, without much of the cruft. But that's not what the tools did, and so JSON became a (sort-of) human-readable data-interchange format, with no validation.
So in 2024 we have no good data-x-change formats, just random tools in little niches that make life better in your chosen poison format. We await a rust - a good format with speed, reliability, interoperability, extensibility, and easy-to-use tools/libraries built in.