It's sad that we should expect Haskell users to be chauvinistic about static typing. I have yet to read anyone who advocates for dynamic typing describe static typing as a "flaw".
There's nothing chauvinistic about it. If you want to hear people honestly and accurately describe "static" type system's flaws -- talk to type system theorists.
Type systems can be provably flawed.
What you can prove about a uni-typed late-bound ("dynamic") languages is quite simply that they're unilaterally flawed.
The chauvinism involved is the assumption that a type theory is the only legitimate way to assess the quality of a programming language's type system. Haskell is, of course, a near-ideal language when judged by the values of its creators and advocates. The inability to recognize that those values are subjective is chauvinism.
I know some people really want programming to just be an application of the lambda calculus. It's a model that really appeals to people who prefer a top-down, deductive model to their work. It's similar to the appeal that draws people to Austrian economics.
And yet that is not the original model for thinking about software, nor the only valid one. Haskellers who rely solely on deductive arguments in favor of their method are going to be stuck forever wondering why so few people are using their clearly superior tool.
Less accurate "models" for "thinking about software" are less accurate, and whether they were thought of first or last has no bearing on that. The fact that you're using "earliest date of discovery" as supporting evidence demonstrates that you're not approaching the question as an objective observer.
This isn't a popularity contest, though if you were measuring popularity based on positive impact, that of Haskell has been substantial.
The only advantage to leveraging simpler and less accurate models is that they're easier for the people using them to understand at a micro scale -- at the cost of systemic accuracy and verifiability.
In being less accurate, they create systems that are more difficult to understand, more difficult to abstract and compose, more difficult to optimize, and more difficult to measure.
There's something destructive and anti-intellectual about trying to convince the world that deductive reasoning is just a matter of opinion.
>It's sad that we should expect Haskell users to be chauvinistic about static typing.
We don't expect that. We expect them to recognize that better type systems are better than worse type systems. Which seems pretty obvious when stated that way.
>I have yet to read anyone who advocates for dynamic typing describe static typing as a "flaw".
Try looking on the internet. Every "static vs dynamic" argument has 99% of the dynamic side arguing that static typing is bad because java's type system limits them and doesn't prevent any bugs.
That it's better to accurately and reliably modeling complex systems and invariants through provable assertions is objectively is no more an empty statement than to say that it's better to apply informed materials and structural engineering to the design of complex physical products than to build ad-hoc designs of unknown parameters through guesswork.
If you think that building software is like building bridges, then yes. If you think that it's the exploration of a problem domain that may not be known to you at the start of the process and is subject to various degrees of iteration (e.g. a process more like writing a script/play), then you get vastly different requirements. That's what I meant by "if you define better as more static typing". "Better" is a normative statement and can never be absolute, it's always relative to a choice.
I don't see how it follows that iteration reduces the degree to which one must understand a system. That's just a rephrasing of the attractive but ultimately empty "dynamic typing is just more creative."
Bridges (or car engines, or any other engineered product) aren't invented whole cloth sans iteration. However, it's understanding of the invariants of the iterated system that allow for directed iterative design and ultimately better products.
What's wrong with being passionate about something you believe in?
It seems to me that this "chauvinism" is in the eye of the beholder, offended that others are suggesting that the tools they have invested time in may not be the best way to do things.
Personally, I am quite excited by the prospect of learning and investigating better tools. I think we're only just beginning down the road to finding better ways of programming.
