Sometimes there are these moments of truth. They happen completely unexpectedly, such as when I read this tweet:

Good discussion of Facebook Flow – http://t.co/5KTKakDB0w — David J. Pearce (@whileydave) November 23, 2014

David is the author of the lesser-known but not at all lesser-interesting Whiley programming language, a language that has a lot of static type checking built in it. One of the most interesting features of the Whiley language is flow sensitive typing (sometimes also simply called flow typing), which is mostly useful when used along with union types. An example from the getting started guide

function indexOf(string str, char c) => null|int: function split(string str, char c) => [string]: var idx = indexOf(str,c) // idx has type null|int if idx is int: // idx now has type int string below = str[0..idx] string above = str[idx..] return [below,above] else: // idx now has type null return [str] // no occurrence

Remember, other languages like Ceylon also know flow-sensitive typing, and even Java does to a certain extent, because Java has union types, too!

try { ... } catch (SQLException | IOException e) { if (e instanceof SQLException) doSomething((SQLException) e); else doSomethingElse((IOException) e); }

Granted, Java’s flow-sensitive typing is explicit and verbose. We could expect the Java compiler to infer all the types. The following should type-check and compile just as well:

try { ... } catch (SQLException | IOException e) { if (e instanceof SQLException) // e is guaranteed to be of type SQLException doSomething(e); else // e is guaranteed to be of type IOException doSomethingElse(e); }

Flow typing or flow sensitive typing means that the compiler can infer the only possible type from the control flow of the surrounding program. It is a relatively new concept in modern languages like Ceylon, and it makes static typing extremely powerful, especially if the language also supports sophisticated type inference via var or val keywords!

JavaScript static typing with Flow

Let’s get back to David’s Tweet and have a look at what the article said about Flow:

http://sitr.us/2014/11/21/flow-is-the-javascript-type-checker-i-have-been-waiting-for.html

The presence of a use of length with a null argument informs Flow that there should be a null check in that function. This version does type-check: function length(x) { if (x) { return x.length; } else { return 0; } } var total = length('Hello') + length(null); Flow is able to infer that x cannot be null inside the if body.

That’s quite cunning. A similar upcoming feature can be observed in Microsoft’s TypeScript. But Flow is different (or claims to be different) from TypeScript. The essence of Facebook Flow can be seen in this paragraph from the official Flow announcement:

Flow’s type checking is opt-in — you do not need to type check all your code at once. However, underlying the design of Flow is the assumption that most JavaScript code is implicitly statically typed; even though types may not appear anywhere in the code, they are in the developer’s mind as a way to reason about the correctness of the code. Flow infers those types automatically wherever possible, which means that it can find type errors without needing any changes to the code at all. On the other hand, some JavaScript code, especially frameworks, make heavy use of reflection that is often hard to reason about statically. For such inherently dynamic code, type checking would be too imprecise, so Flow provides a simple way to explicitly trust such code and move on. This design is validated by our huge JavaScript codebase at Facebook: Most of our code falls in the implicitly statically typed category, where developers can check their code for type errors without having to explicitly annotate that code with types.

Let this sink in

most JavaScript code is implicitly statically typed

again

JavaScript code is implicitly statically typed

Yes!

Programmers love type systems. Programmers love to reason formally about their data types and put them in narrow constraints to be sure the program is correct. That’s the whole essence of static typing: To make less mistakes because of well-designed data structures.

People also love to put their data structures in well-designed forms in databases, which is why SQL is so popular and “schema-less” databases will not gain more market share. Because in fact, it’s the same story. You still have a schema in a “schema-less” database, it’s just not type checked and thus leaves you all the burden of guaranteeing correctness.

On a side note: Obviously, some NoSQL vendors keep writing these ridiculous blog posts to desperately position their products, claiming that you really don’t need any schema at all, but it’s easy to see through that marketing gag. True need for schemalessness is as rare as true need for dynamic typing. In other words, when is the last time you’ve written a Java program and called every method via reflection? Exactly…

But there’s one thing that statically typed languages didn’t have in the past and that dynamically typed languages did have: Means to circumvent verbosity. Because while programmers love type systems and type checking, programmers do not love typing (as in typing on the keyboard).

Verbosity is the killer. Not static typing

Consider the evolution of Java:

Java 4

List list = new ArrayList(); list.add("abc"); list.add("xyz"); // Eek. Why do I even need this Iterator? Iterator iterator = list.iterator(); while (iterator.hasNext()) { // Gee, I *know* I only have strings. Why cast? String value = (String) iterator.next(); // [...] }

Java 5

// Agh, I have to declare the generic type twice! List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>(); list.add("abc"); list.add("xyz"); // Much better, but I have to write String again? for (String value : list) { // [...] }

Java 7

// Better, but I still need to write down two // times the "same" List type List<String> list = new ArrayList<>(); list.add("abc"); list.add("xyz"); for (String value : list) { // [...] }

Java 8

// We're now getting there, slowly Stream.of("abc", "xyz").forEach(value -> { // [...] });

On a side-note, yes, you could’ve used Arrays.asList() all along.

Java 8 is still far from perfect, but things are getting better and better. The fact that I finally do not have to declare a type anymore in a lambda argument list because it can be inferred by the compiler is something really important for productivity and adoption.

Consider the equivalent of a lambda pre-Java 8 (if we had Streams before):

// Yes, it's a Consumer, fine. And yes it takes Strings Stream.of("abc", "xyz").forEach(new Consumer<String>(){ // And yes, the method is called accept (who cares) // And yes, it takes Strings (I already say so!?) @Override public void accept(String value) { // [...] } });

Now, if we’re comparing the Java 8 version with a JavaScript version:

["abc", "xyz"].forEach(function(value) { // [...] });

We have almost reached as little verbosity as the functional, dynamically typed language that is JavaScript (I really wouldn’t mind those missing list and map literals in Java), with the only difference that we (and the compiler) know that value is of type String . And we know that the forEach() method exists. And we know that forEach() takes a function with one argument.

In the end of the day, things seem to boil down to this:

Dynamically typed languages like JavaScript and PHP have become popular mainly because they “just ran”. You didn’t have to learn all the “heavy” syntax that classic statically typed languages required (just think of Ada and PL/SQL!). You could just start writing your program. Programmers “knew” that the variables would contain strings, there’s no need to write it down. And that’s true, there’s no need to write everything down!

Consider Scala (or C#, Ceylon, pretty much any modern language):

val value = "abc"

What else can it be, other than a String ?

val list = List("abc", "xyz")

What else can it be, other than a List[String] ?

Note that you can still explicitly type your variables if you must – there are always those edge cases:

val list : List[String] = List[String]("abc", "xyz")

But most of the syntax is “opt-in” and can be inferred by the compiler.

Dynamically typed languages are dead

The conclusion of all this is that once syntactic verbosity and friction is removed from statically typed languages, there is absolutely no advantage in using a dynamically typed language. Compilers are very fast, deployment can be fast too, if you use the right tools, and the benefit of static type checking is huge. (don’t believe it? read this article)

As an example, SQL is also a statically typed language where much of the friction is still created by syntax. Yet, many people believe that it is a dynamically typed language, because they access SQL through JDBC, i.e. through type-less concatenated Strings of SQL statements. If you were writing PL/SQL, Transact-SQL, or embedded SQL in Java with jOOQ, you wouldn’t think of SQL this way and you’d immediately appreciate the fact that your PL/SQL, Transact-SQL, or your Java compiler would type-check all of your SQL statements.

So, let’s abandon this mess that we’ve created because we’re too lazy to type all the types (pun). Happy typing!