DYNAMIC VS. STATIC TYPING IN CODING LANGUAGES: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

When you try to understand how coding languages work, you often find such terms as static and dynamic typing. What do they mean, and what’s the difference between them?

Coding – artistic impression. Image credit: Alius Noreika/Bing Image Creator

What is the main difference between dynamic and static typing in coding?

Dynamic and static typing are two ways of defining the types of variables and values in a programming language. The main difference is that dynamically typed languages perform type-checking during execution. Statically typed languages, in contrast, perform type checking at compile time, that is, before run-time.

For example, Phyton or Groovy are considered dynamically typed languages. That means they only translate and type-check the code they are executing on. Some errors in the code may be ignored if the line with the error never executes. In contrast, Java or Go are statically typed languages. If a script contains type errors, it will fail to work until the errors have been fixed.

Another thing to mention is that statically typed languages require you to declare the data types of your variables before you use them. If you use dynamically typed languages, you don’t have to declare the types. That makes dynamically typed languages more flexible and can save time and space.

However, dynamic typing allows variables to change types and sometimes creates unexpected errors. Static typing, in turn, catches errors early but doesn’t offer much stability.