On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 9:04 AM, Scott McLoughlin <scottmc...@gmail.com>wrote:
> My intention was to far more specifically ask: why "small > core, user comprehensible and modifiable, and boot-strapable" > systems seem to be the province of either latently typed (Smalltak, > Lisp, Scheme, Icon (?), etc.) or untyped (Forth, B (?)) languages > Well, most static type systems aren't well designed for 'open' composition. It is difficult, for example, to obtain a Haskell function from a plugin resource. Without effective support for open composition, developers are under pressure to duplicate services within each application or module. However, they'll end up duplicating services in diverse and subtly incompatible ways (witness the plethora of collections types) so they'll also need a lot of adapter code. The problem quickly snowballs, growing ever more monolithic. But static typing isn't the culprit. We could, presumably, design a static type system suitable for open composition with loose coupling... though, we may need to compromise on a few useful features.
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