Language Models for Programming

The other day I wrote about the new tools that developers are using to get work done. Another topic I see discussed is different language models as part of the development process. I like to use and think about different programming languages. So I thought it would be interesting to go through some of the neat features in different languages that I’ve used, and how that changes your mental model of a program. Static vs Dynamic Typing and Compilation I started programming in Java and then learnt Ruby a few years later. I was completely blown away by how easy it was to write code in Ruby when you didn’t have to spell out all the types. The thing worth remembering here is that you often think of dynamic typing as being intrinsically part of interpreted scripting languages (like Ruby, Python, or JavaScript) but that’s just a convenient pairing. There’s nothing stopping you having a compiled dynamically typed language, or an interpreted statically typed language. Elixir is a compiled,…