On Mar 20, 2006, at 1:52 PM, Bryan Sant wrote:
Not that I don't believe you, but please supply and example. How
would a dynamic language make a singleton, prototype, strategy,
flyweight, facade, or adapter pattern unneeded? I can see how some of
these patterns would require fewer charaters to be typed (not need to
cast a value frome one type to another or create
super-classes/interfaces in some cases). But again, we'er back to my
original point that A) with an IDE, I'm just as fast and B)
sacraficing type-safety costs in unit tests.
Well, take Strategy (and the other patterns that differ from Strategy
only in intent). For most uses, you can replace the strategy object
with a higher-order function or code block or something of that
nature, depending on what language you're using. Peter Norvig has an
interesting slide show about patterns in dynamic languages here:
http://norvig.com/design-patterns/
I'm not trying to insult Java or Java users, just to point out that
static typing does add conceptual overhead in some (but certainly not
all) tasks.
In the real world, static typing does not alleviate the need for unit
tests, and few unit tests need to be written specifically to catch
type errors, since they will usually show up in the sort of test that
you'd write for a statically-typed language, too. So, that cost for
dynamic languages is just about as bogus as the extra keyboard
overhead people try to place on Java.
I learn something new ever day. I'm switching to Haskell on my
next project.
I certainly wouldn't recommend that, unless your next project is
simply aimed at learning Haskell. It's an interesting language, with
the potential to be both concise and efficient, but it's not going to
make you more productive in writing typical business applications as
it stands today. I brought it up merely as an example of a
statically-typed language that is more concise than many dynamically-
typed languages, and I thought you'd welcome the example since you
seem to be a fan of static typing. If you are simply a fan of static-
typing because Java is statically-typed and you don't really care
about it in other languages, well, I'm sorry I pegged you wrong.
Untill you have to write the documentation that explains what your
code does. Not that you don't have to do this with Java, but the
language is far more self-documententing than most other languages.
I'm not saying that smaller code isn't better. I do think so. But in
the totallity of what a good developer is expected to do (write unit
tests, and document your code) Java (or C#) isn't nearly as bad off as
some try to paint it.
I'm not trying to paint Java in a bad light here; it's a pretty
decent tool for writing software, and definitely made some steps
forward from C++. I don't think it's the final answer in software
development, though, and I think keeping up-to-date with what's going
on in the programming language field and having multiple languages
with different properties available to work with is more important
than trying to make a specific language look like the best tool for
every job.
I think you interpreted my response to your earlier post as anti-
Java, while I didn't mean it that way at all. I was just trying to
broaden the discussion a bit. Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I
think that features of Lisp, Smalltalk, Ruby, Haskell, ML, etc. will
be working their way into mainstream languages over the next few years.
--Levi
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