alt Hacker News> Every time there’s a new kind of bug, we add a language feature to prevent that kind of bug.
That's why learning more academic, 'non-practical' aspects of computer science is sometimes beneficial. Otherwise very few will naturally develop the abstract thinking that allows them to see uncaught exception and null pointer are exactly the same 'kind of bug.'
Anyway the author got it completely upside down. The stricter mental model of static typing came first (in more academic languages like Haskell and Ocaml). Then Java etc. half-assed them. Then we have Swift and Kotlin and whatever trying to un-half-ass them while keeping some terminology from Java etc. to not scare Java etc. programmers.
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As someone not familiar with Haskell and Ocaml, which parts of Java are poorly implemented?
I suppose it's somewhat accurate to claim that Haskell and Ocaml historically preceded Java (or even Objective-C). But Java wasn't inspired by those academic languages, but C: a then widely used real-world language with only partial static types.
(Not saying Java's attempt to remedy C's problems wasn't half-assed — it was.) The trend to plug holes is primarily motivated by empirical evidence of bug classes. Not by elegance of academic research.
As Bjarne Stroustrup famously quipped:
> “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.”
Swift, Kotlin, Rust, C++ are attempt to become languages that everyone complains about, not Haskell or Ocaml.