LiveTyping - Wednesday, June 30th
The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, June 30th. Hernan Wilkinson will talk about his LiveTyping project. Currently, almost all mainstream dynamically typed languages support type annotation a la Strongtalk. Python calls it "type hints", TypeScript is JavaScript+type annotations, PHP calls it "type declarations" and Ruby does it through a tool called Sorbet. All of them annotate the types in the source code and it is the programmer who must write and maintain the annotation. In all cases, it is not mandatory for the system to correctly type check for it to run. LiveTyping is a type system proposal for Smalltalk, that seeks similar objectives but implemented in a different way. First, it is the environment itself that collects and maintains the types based on the execution of the system, not the programmer. Second, the types are not interleaved in the source code, thus maintaining the syntax and simplicity of the language. And fin...