>In the one and only case in my experience in which I advocated using
>Smalltalk for a significant project, the "technical" folks on the
>project voted the idea down in favor of Java, which they believed to
>have advantages in performance, type safety, and market acceptance.
>Draw what conclusions you like from this, but don't a priori assume
>that "management" is the source of all difficulties.

So, I've taken to asking students (in oral exams, office hours, and 
the like) what evidence they have that "safe types" buys them 
anything?

"The types help the compiler catch errors in the program," they 
respond.  I ask them if the types really do.  Do the warnings really 
point to errors, or just type problems?  Are they errors that you 
would have found easily and quickly without the types?  Then there's 
the cost of types.  Casting, declaring types, and fixing code to 
address warnings takes a good bit of time.  Is the cost worth the 
benefit?

But this is actually more than me being "pedagogues who look on their 
profession as an opportunity for pederastic abuse" :-)  I'm seriously 
interested: Does anyone know of any empirical evidence for the value 
of types?  Or is it a myth that we invented to rationalize the typing 
needed to improve the compiler's performance?

Mark

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html