But I think their criticism comes from an ivory tower where people in general agree that efficient programming needs strong and sound tools.
Unfortunately, in practice it seems to be all about "velocity". When you see a huge codebase in python grown over several years and try to refactor it, reason about it, or just enhance it, you will inevitably come to the conclusion that the omission of static type checking is a grave error from a system-design perspective. And when you work with the developers of such a code base you will understand that static type checking is first and foremost a means of communication between the language implementation and the developers. Without this tool it is like taking away a common spoken language between the developers and having to translate everything into some form of pidgin.
But I think their criticism comes from an ivory tower where people in general agree that efficient programming needs strong and sound tools.
Unfortunately, in practice it seems to be all about "velocity". When you see a huge codebase in python grown over several years and try to refactor it, reason about it, or just enhance it, you will inevitably come to the conclusion that the omission of static type checking is a grave error from a system-design perspective. And when you work with the developers of such a code base you will understand that static type checking is first and foremost a means of communication between the language implementation and the developers. Without this tool it is like taking away a common spoken language between the developers and having to translate everything into some form of pidgin.