I'm curious how much our early programming experiences fix (as in, make permanent) our mindset about types.
As a little kid, I dabbled a bit in BASIC.
But my more formative years, in high school and college, really centered on statically typed languages: Pascal, then C++.
In the 20+ years since then, statically typed languages have always seemed far saner to me than, e.g. Python.
I can think of various explanations for this:
(a) Because I got my start in statically typed languages, that became ingrained as my "natural" way to reason about programs. Which was self-reinforcing, as practice reinforced my ability to express program constraints using types.
(b) I'm naturally biased toward writing correct programs, rather than rapid prototyping. So I would have gravitated towards statically typed (or even proven) programs regardless of my early education.
This probably plays a role. But for me, I started with C#, but still after I later used Python, I wasn't using types at all. Only after I got more experience in programming, and especially was exposed to Rust, then I started to write Python in a.. different way :)
I had personal experience with statically-typed languages before I ventured into industry with Python. Years of working in large python code bases revealed the wisdom of once again returning to statically-typed languages.
As a little kid, I dabbled a bit in BASIC.
But my more formative years, in high school and college, really centered on statically typed languages: Pascal, then C++.
In the 20+ years since then, statically typed languages have always seemed far saner to me than, e.g. Python.
I can think of various explanations for this:
(a) Because I got my start in statically typed languages, that became ingrained as my "natural" way to reason about programs. Which was self-reinforcing, as practice reinforced my ability to express program constraints using types.
(b) I'm naturally biased toward writing correct programs, rather than rapid prototyping. So I would have gravitated towards statically typed (or even proven) programs regardless of my early education.