Type Safety (was Re: fun and empowerment)
Mark Guzdial
guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
Fri Jan 28 03:11:55 UTC 2000
>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
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