Comment by Julian O on Type-safeness in Shell · 2019-05-12T17:05:13.831Z · LW · GW

In the early 1990s, there was a computer called the Rational 1000, which was pretty much a specialised development machine for producing code in the Ada programming language.

The "shell" language for the system was... Ada.

It was a weird choice - Ada is compiled. Ada is a strongly/strictly typed language. Ada is certainly not terse, but the IDE helped with a lot of the boilerplating. It is not what you normally think of as a scripting language.

Nonetheless, I think it was very successful. The users all knew Ada well. The command line (itself, written with the help of an IDE) knew all the types of all the parameters and could help complete them (alas - very, very slowly).

I see this as an anecdote to support your idea that a typed scripting language could work.