I think more often what people actually appreciate about dynamically typed languages is the ability to easily interoperate between types and to easily overload operators across types, but these things are all possible in statically typed languages
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Also, many dynamically typed languages come with a good REPL because you have to track so much information in your head that it's better if you get a quick feedback loop. More statically typed languages should also have a good REPL IMO
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And we need better tools to help you fix your good when you get type errors. The compiler should do the work of tracking information and warning you, but it should also do a lot of the work of helping you fix things, and that's still missing
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One other thing I think people appreciate about dynamically typed languages is just how easy it is to print things. This is literally the only thing I like about Python. We need to find a way to make printing just as easy in statically typed languages
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I think a lot of people are also used to really limiting type systems, like Java's type system. But there are some really beautiful static type systems that give you an absurd amount of expressive power to defer information to the compiler instead of your brain or comments
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I know people doing very iterative development (like games or art stuff or whatever) often want to work with programs that they know are partially broken, because they only care about the part they’re iterating on right now and will avoid the broken cases
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having to go and fix your program in many places because you made a change to a type means you get delayed from iterating on the design of a small part that you might end up changing or throwing away soon
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being able to make changes to only a small part rather than having to maintain global correctness is a big win of dynamic types
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Yeah that's a good case for gradual types TBH
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I think it might be a case for deferred type errors also, have a mode to turn all static type errors into runtime crashes (I believe Haskell has this, and I don’t know of any other language that does)
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Yeah, deferred type errors are nice! I don't think it's as resilient as something like gradual types, but I don't mind? At least you get to run something, and it doesn't seem as complicated to add? And I think it would be interesting to have it be the default mode.