Lutger: >When you say 'not that many bugs', how often does you code compile with >errors?<
I am not able to give you a good answer, I am sorry, so I can just chat a little. What I can tell you is that I now know both Python and D (I know Python more, but my experience of D is getting sufficient), and I am usually able to write correct programs in quite less time in Python. "correct programs" includes unit tests, debugging, global testing, etc too. It's not easy to tell when a program is "debugged enough", it's an art. To write a "correct" program in C I need even more time and sometimes at the end I am not sure yet the program is debugged enough (despite I know C for far more time than D). This is what I care of. >Because every compile time error you encounter is a bug in a dynamic language, >and within that perspective I think it's quite a lot.< The situation isn't so linear. In Python I often don't put many bugs in the first place, because syntax and semantics is less bug prone or more flexible, etc. In Python I have the shell, where I can try out single lines of code or whole functions, that helps both in writing correct code and in debugging it (and later you can even copy&paste such interactive sessions, with small changes, to use them as doctests). >Now, that doesn't mean dynamic languages are more bug prone, just that the way >you program with them is different. Different enough that you can't compare >type systems of static and dynamic languages that easily.< I agree. Yet, I have often written the same small programs in both D and Python so I can compare the whole programming time, how much long they are, how much reliable they are, etc. I have adopted in my D coding some of the good practices I have developed in Python (regarding unit testing, functional-style programming, using higher-level functions, using templates to make more flexible functions), and the results seems good enough :-) Bye, bearophile
