On 12/09/2006, at 3:39 PM, Malcolm V wrote:
Of course, for quick off the cuff things, dynamic typing
is a god-send and no-one has to think too hard, especially the twit
that
lets it slip into a production environment.
I think dynamic typing's actually a total cop-out. There is exactly
one sceneario where dynamic typing is necessary and useful, which is
when you are loading unknown code at run-time (e.g. plugins) and you
have no idea what that code could potentially do. Dynamic typing is
useful there since you're actually doing type-checking of the code
you're loading and ensuring that it's at least of the correct type[1].
Advocating the use of dynamic typing as a standard language feature
means that you don't care at all about catching bugs early in
development. IMHO a language with dynamic typing has been designed
by someone who doesn't know much about programming language theory
(I'm looking at you, Guido van Rossum), or someone who's just plain
lazy. Why on Earth should the expression
"foo" + 5
compile? (Excluding all you miscreants who think that the resulting
string should be "foo5": if you belong in that crowd, you can stick
with your nonsensical Javascript type conversions where adding "1"
and 1 will give you the answer to a kid's riddle. What, you expected
Javascript to give you an error there?)
Objective-C is proof that you can mix both static typing with dynamic
typing and build robust, reliable applications that are easily
extensible. Opting for zero type-checking during the compile phase
is simply due to stupidity or laziness on the language designer's part.
1. One other often-quoted scenario where dynamic typing is necessary
is if you're serialising/marshalling data to/from a network or disk.
That isn't a dynamic typing problem: that's a parsing problem.
--
% Andre Pang : trust.in.love.to.save <http://www.algorithm.com.au/>
_______________________________________________
coders mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/coders
