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osener | on: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language
In my experience restricting programs that can be expressed is a good thing, even more so with agentic engineering. The more guardrails there are, strong typing/TDD/computer use/..., the solution space shrinks and chance of a robust solution increases. Sure maybe this burns more tokens going in circles but it feels less like a slot machine more like a robot searching for a solution for a well-defined problem.

Devs have very strong opinions about dynamically typed programming languages. But reasons such as "exploratory programming", "expressiveness", "taste" that makes them feel good to program in for humans does not matter for agents. Agents don't care that the language "limits them" and prevents them from expressing the code in a succint way because it would not type check.

josevalim | parent
Agreed on the guardrails bit. My point is that we still don't have much evidence that static types are an effective way to constrain the search space for coding agents, or how much value they add on top of other mechanisms. Redundancy can certainly be beneficial, but how much and at what cost?

On expressiveness, people often frame it as a dynamic-language goal, but a large portion of type system research is precisely about making type systems more expressive so they can describe a wider range of programs and invariants. This is clearly something both camps value. I suppose another interesting benchmark could be: how do coding agents perform across languages with different degrees of type-system expressiveness?

We may directionally agree, but it is hard to draw conclusions without measurements. Overall, I'd say this is much more of an open question than people give it credit for.