I’ve been kind of out of my comfort zone last 3 weeks, and was trying to use as many new languages and technologies as possible.
I’ve used C++, JavaScript, React, PHP and Hack to name a few, and I’ve noticed really cool thing - many popular programming languages are moving towards mixing best of static and dynamic typing.
- C++ (statically typed language) now has
autokeyword, specifying that compiler should deduce type of variable or return type of function automatically; - JavaScript has Flow - static type checker from Facebook, and there is TypeScript from Microsoft which compiles to JS;
- PHP has type hints since version 5, and they are greatly improved in PHP7;
- Hack has even more advanced type annotations than PHP;
- Python added type hints in 3.5, which recently made me very excited.
And it looks like all big companies are using this stuff extensively! Isn’t it awesome? After mainly using Go for last year, I’m super excited seeing how dynamically typed languages become safer with type hints, and how C++ brings convenience and ease of dynamic typing to its users.