> > Agreed -- which is why I find your speculation about "lightening up" with > "more experience ... meeting the demands of practical coding" to be unsound. > For those of us whose "practical programming" context includes a high cost > associated with most any runtime bug, greater embrace of static typing, not > "lightening up", comes with more practical experience. I can be happy using > a dynamically typed language when the price to be paid for getting it wrong > isn't as high; but all of my experience goes against "lightening up" in the > demanding programming context where I work every day
We're arguing in circles. I think the fundamental question is between two issues. On the potential drawback of strong static types, you have trying to model all of the complex interlocking concepts in a static type system and possibly dealing with long compile times. On the potential drawback of dynamic typing, you have the risk of a runtime type error. The question, then, is whether the flexibility of dynamic types lets you develop, test, unit test, and system test code so much faster than you would in a language with strong static types that you are able to prevent all runtime type errors anyway. The difficulty in deciding the question is that the benefits and drawbacks of either approach don't really manifest until your project is huge. It's relatively straightforward to get your dynamic typing right in a 500 line program, and it's relatively straightforward to not have any issues modeling your logic and data with static types in a 500 line program, and the speed difference in development between the two isn't significant. Once you get to hundreds of thousands of lines of code, things get interesting - and it also gets much harder to compare between the two. If you look at Youtube, Reddit, Twitter, Github, Tumblr, and Facebook, they were written in languages with dynamic types. A lot of them switched partly or totally to languages with static types for performance reasons once they got big enough. But I really think they stand as testimonial to the fact that dynamic types allow for faster development than static types. If you're guiding a rocket or controlling medical equipment, stay static. But for other use cases, that's a pretty compelling case. -Mike -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
