> it feels like sometime after Java got popular [...] a large chunk of the collective programming community forgot why strong static type checking was invented and are now having to rediscover this.

I think you have a very rose-tinted view of the past: while on the academic side static types were intended for proof on the industrial side it was for efficiency. C didn't get static types in order to prove your code was correct, and it's really not great at doing that, it got static types so you could account for memory and optimise it.

Java didn't help either, when every type has to be a separate file the cost of individual types is humongous, even more so when every field then needs two methods.

> In most strong statically typed languages, you wouldn't often pass strings and generic dictionaries around.

In most strong statically typed languages you would not, but in most statically typed codebases you would. Just look at the Windows interfaces. In fact while Simonyi's original "apps hungarian" had dim echoes of static types that got completely washed out in system, which was used widely in C++, which is already a statically typed language.

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guerrilla 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> I think you have a very rose-tinted view of the past

I think they also forgot the entire Perl era.

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esafak 5 hours ago | parent [-]

That's understandable. Youthful indiscretion is best forgotten.

	▲	zahlman an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I can still remember trying to deal with structured binary data in Perl, just because I didn't want to fiddle around with memory management in C. I'm not sure it was actually any less painful, and I ultimately abandoned that first attempt. (Decades later, my "magnum opus" has been through multiple mental redesigns and unsatisfactory partial implementations. This time, for sure...)