I also see this mentioned often and have wondered the same. I can sort of envision this working in a single threaded application, but how would this work in a web application for example? If a problematic function needs to be debugged, can you pick what thread you're debugging? If not, do all incoming requests get blocked while you debug and step through stack frames?
I'm not a fan of dynamic typing at all (currently maintaining a decade's old e-comm monolith written in Ruby on Rails), but instead of arguing about what bugs are caught where, I've instead switched to arguing from a position of developer experience. The _tooling_ that statically typed languages have is levels above those found in dynamic languages. Runtime errors are runtime errors, but knowing at typing-time that the shape of thing A is what thing B needs is a huge benefit.
>If you mess up, redo the part you messed up correctly 5 times in a row.
I think it may be important to note _when_ to redo this. I started off this way, but after working with a guitar teacher (a Berklee graduate), he recommended that I continue on with the song and return to the problematic parts afterwards. If you constantly stop at the problematic parts to replay them and get it right, you'll have no idea what other parts you'll have trouble with further into the song until much later. In addition to that, being able to move on and continue playing the song after making a mistake is an important skill itself. If you build that skill, it's usually only other musicians that will notice -- a regular audience won't.
>easy for agents to write and beautiful for humans to review
What's left unspoken here, and something I've brought up in other threads that have mentioned Ruby + LLMs, is that they continue to struggle _comprehending_ Ruby (and Rails) style code. In a fresh project, agents writing code for humans to review is a solid approach, but when the codebase grows and the project starts suffering from the downsides of dynamic typing, you're not going to be able to lean on that LLM to aide you in refactoring.
LispWorks and Allegro are both interesting, but I've found their IDE offerings to be very limited. I haven't used either since I was playing around with CL during Covid, but from what I recall, even the basic IDE experience of writing code was severely lacking: poor autocomplete, poor syntax highlighting, clunky interfaces. In most discussions I see about them, they're only recommended for their compilers, not for their IDE offerings.
This is the perfect way to create a code-base that's incomprehensible. Claude may be good at generating Rails code, but every LLM I've tried to date has struggled immensely with parsing and understanding an existing Ruby on Rails code-base.
I’ve found LLMs to be severely underwhelming. A week or two ago I tried having both Gemini3 and GPT Codex refactor a simple Ruby class hierarchy and neither could even identify the classes that inherited from the class I wanted removed. Severely underwhelming. Describing what was wanted here boils down to minima language and they both failed.
I feel like I'm living in a totally different world or I'm being gaslit by LLMs when I read stuff like this and other similar comments in this thread. Do you mind mentioning _what_ language / tech stack you're in? At my current job, we have a large Ruby on Rails codebase and just this week Gemini 2.5 and 3 struggled to even identify what classes inherited from another class.
> I think the future of software is going to be unimaginably dynamic.
>...I’m not entirely sure what that looks like yet, but things like this are a step in that direction.
This made me stop and think for a moment as to what this would look like as well. I'm having trouble finding it, but I think there was a post by Joe Armstrong (of Erlang) that talked about globally (as in across system boundaries, not global as in global variable) addressable functions?
> I believe that the benefits of static typing somewhat decrease in the web arena
I’ve seen this sentiment expressed numerous times and have never found it to be true in my own work (e-comm), do you mind mentioning _what_ type of domain your web apps are in?
Edit: or if not domain, what do you mean by “web arena”
In my experience it's boiled down to the type of data you're working with. Building nested, tree-like structures and then submitting that structure to the back-end as one request is more easily done via the front-end than a bunch of back-and-forth requests followed up by a "commit" request.
edit: I suppose this is different concern than a true SPA, but as another sibling comment points out, its just a matter of time before routing makes its way into the front-end as well.
>These runtime typing efforts look nicer than Sorbet but, as far as I can see, you still have to have complete test coverage to trigger runtime checks if you want to spot correctness issues before you deploy into production.
I think you're right, and if that's the case, aren't these libraries (Lowtype, Literal) more akin to Design by Contract mechanisms?