On 18 mar 2008, at 19.47, Don Stewart wrote:
jgbailey:
From a recent interview[1] with the guy leading Ruby development on
.NET at Microsoft:
"You spend less time writing software than you spend maintaining
software. Optimizing for writing software versus maintaining software
is probably the wrong thing to do. Static typing makes it harder to
maintain software because it's harder to change it."
Two years ago I would have agreed with that statement. Now - no way.
Make the compiler work for you. I've done a lot of Ruby development
and I would never use it for a project of more than 3 or 4 people.
It's an awesome language but I don't think it would scale to
programming "in the large." Any object can be modified at any time.
Determining where a particular method comes from can be an
exercise in
Sherlockian deduction. Give an organization of 100 developers that
much freedom and I can only imagine chaos would result.
Justin
Agreed, maintainability is all about restricting the damage people
can do, and making refactoring safer :)
The kind of havoc a new programmer can create in a pure, strongly
typed,
polymorphic chunk of code is tiny compared to an "anything goes"
language scenario.
Well, that kind of sounds like new programmer = bad programmer (as
you talk about damage prevention). I guess you don't mean it that
way, but I think it's worth to try to make it clear that static
typing can help programmers new to the code easily check where things
are used and gives them the confidence that their changes won't
introduce unintended side effects. A careless programmer can still
break the whole program, just use "head" in a sufficiently hidden
place, so it's not about preventing people from wreaking havoc to
your code base *on purpose* but rather to give them a safety net. I
think this is a common misconception in static vs. dynamic flame wars
-- static typing is often dismissed as not trusting the programmer
and overly constraining his/her latitude.
/ Thomas
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