On Thursday, 14 March 2013 at 16:48:29 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
And it has been made indeed. The question is on agreeing or not
with specifics. The stereotypical argument in favor of dynamic
typing goes as follows:
Q: Does static typing detect all bugs?
A: No.
Q: Then unittests are necessary.
A: Correct.
Q: So if static typing is insufficient, why not rely on
unittests alone to do all checking? It's also bothersome for
some people to obey types, annotate stuff etc.
A: There are still errors that can be better detected with
static checking, and many dynamic programs that work by
accident etc.
I see we agree this is the same problem materialized in another
form. I find it rather weird that you conclude different things
when the problem is the same in the first place.
I don't say that unittest are useless, but why rely on
unittest when the
machine can do the job for you ?
In both cases the machine does the work. My argument is that
adding an additional layer of typing on top of templates caters
to people who want to ship code that has literally zero
testing. That's not a priority as far as I'm concerned.
I have other benefit, as the capability for the compiler to give
understandable error message instead of a wall of template errors.
This is clearly not a priority anyway. We should stop building on
foundation that aren't solid or everything will collapse.
