I don't recall anyone disliking types. Lots of people disliked static typing, or more directly static, explicit typing. For instance, I've been around many conversations over the years where people would say goofy things like they couldn't use Python because it's untyped. That's insane: Python is strongly typed. It's also dynamically typed, which is a different dimension.

There are some genuinely untyped languages, or more typically "stringly typed" ones. I hacked around on AREXX as a youth, where all values are strings, even when they look like numbers. Most of the Unix CLI tools like sed could be, uh, said, to be stringly typed. Most of the "discussions" about typing, though, involved Python and similar dynamically typed languages. I don't think I've ever heard someone claim that weakly typed or untyped languages were great for building large project. I've heard plenty of people claiming that Python couldn't be used to build large projects because it was dynamically typed, or "untyped" as they wrongly described it, which was confusing to those of us using it to build large projects.

Type systems just used to be bad. Anything that forces you to use a class hierarchy to represent an "OR" type (sum types) is painful to work with. Modern languages like TypeScript / Rust / Swift / Kotlin that have sum types are dramatically much nicer.

Yeah, I think was algebraic + pattern matching that break the ghetto. Suddenly types were far more useful without going crazy like Haskell!

P.D: Before, the exposure of types was from C++/Java, and special C++ is always a horrible exponent of anything except how make a overly complex language.

Once you see what good application of types look like, is far better sell!

> Remember when people would argue about how types weren't worth the effort?

> if nothing else for how it's been able to popularize types.

This is such an odd, javascript dev take.

I don't think ... serious people... argued that.

That's a bit hyperbolic so I'm sure I'm wrong, but I have an ace: if you point me at very smart people who argued against types I'm gonna say that they weren't serious. I think it's not possible, if you have the relevant experience of working on both typed and untyped codebases of at least moderate complexity with at least one collaborator, to come away seriously believing that the untyped way is superior (unless you were forced to use a really bad typed language, I guess). And arguing that untyped languages are better without that experience is also not serious, in the sense that anyone can unseriously say anything if they don't care about being well-informed enough to be right.

dhh is still not very fond of it. To each their own.

https://world.hey.com/dhh/turbo-8-is-dropping-typescript-701...

I still do argue that for JS. I have yet to see it worth the effort other than making things feel comfortable for former OOP devs coming from other languages.

edit: the downvote button HN is not for disagreeing with comments or unpopular opinions. please dont turn hn into reddit.