On Tuesday, 4 September 2012 at 19:18:05 UTC, Jacob Carlborg
wrote:
On 2012-09-04 15:59, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
I have on occasion had the benefit of simply adding a member
variable to
instances of a class when I needed it without having to burden
the rest
of the code with knowing about that variable. I felt dirty
doing it...
But I think you are right -- "fake" static typing does not
come close to
actual static typing. If I could count all the time I've
wasted because
I mistyped a member variable name, and it "just worked",
blissfully
reading null instead of the variable I've set, it would
probably add up
to days. Thankfully, netbeans 7 is better at telling me that
a variable
is previously unset or is never used, but it can't be perfect,
especially with this mess I inherited. The original author
thought
"modularity" meant importing large pieces of functions from
other files,
which the IDE refuses to correctly interpret.
This, of course, all comes from two guys who really like
static typing
:) We *may* have a biased view.
I can tell you this, I've wished many times that I had static
typing in Ruby. I've also wished quite many times I had dynamic
typing in D. I think optional static typing, like Dart, sounds
like a good idea.
I'm currently updating a Rails project to Ruby 1.9 and I really
wished I had static typing. Just that fact that it won't load
file until it's actually needed is quite annoying. Finding all
the corner cases can be quite a lot of work. For example, a
partial that is loaded when the rendering is triggered by an
Ajax request.
In any case, it is what it is -- the existing code-base is
huge, and I
have no real desire to rewrite all of it :) The best I can do
is add
some typing comments and hobble through it (cursing as I go).
If I had
a year of spare time, I could rewrite it all in D!
-Steve
The only experience I've had with dynamic typing (in Python), I
can say I hated it. I prefer to write Java code, which I think
tells a lot about my love for dynamic typing. I probably wouldn't
mind writing some Lua code, but not in the large. Unless you are
working in an environment which changes all the time, so that you
need to adapt your code very quickly, dynamic languages are a
waste of time above ~10,000 lines of code in my opinion.
