Generics

Randal L. Schwartz merlyn at stonehenge.com
Mon Sep 29 01:14:05 UTC 2003


>>>>> "Göran" == Göran Krampe <goran.krampe at bluefish.se> writes:

Göran> Smalltalkers (and other developers fond of dynamically typed
Göran> languages) have generally found that not having to type all
Göran> that crude static stuff (and retype it when refactoring etc,
Göran> cascading dependency changes blabla) gives us much more time
Göran> to do more important stuff. We spend that extra time finding
Göran> the *real* bugs instead - for example by writing good unit
Göran> tests or whatever. So for us the advantages of dynamic types
Göran> clearly outweighs the disadvantages. (I am generalizing here
Göran> of course)

Precisely.  I keep arguing in public forums when I can that "static
typing is neither necessary, nor sufficient, and comes at a net cost
of productivity".  It's the wrong axis to optimize along.

Not sufficent, because no amount of type checking can solve the "these
two integers must sum less than 5 at all times" style of correlations.
Therefore, you must write tests.  And if you're writing tests, type
checking is not necessary!

:-)

-- 
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<merlyn at stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl training!



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list