On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 4:50 AM, mk <[email protected]> wrote: > > Mike Orr wrote: > >> Those are just toy sites for a hobbyist programming language, not big >> mean serious e-commerce servers. And they're so inefficient they must >> waste a huge number of bogomips! > > Somewhat off topic, where I work (software group at big IT corporation) > there is lots and lots of resistance towards dynamic typing. It *is* > felt that dynamic typing, even in the model of strong dynamic typing of > Python, belongs precisely to the realm of "hobbyist languages like PHP". > > I've heard loads and loads of argumentation from software architects how > (specifically, Java) static typing supposedly saves programmer from > creating lots of bugs and how dynamic languages like Python are "for kids".
And Iraq had WMDs too. There is now a significant amount of established Python software (mostly in websites and niche products) that can be compared directly to its Java/C counterparts. You would expect an inferior, bug-prone language to require more development and maintenance resources compared to similar Java/C programs, yet the opposite is the case. And where are the hordes of bugs that strong typing prevents? Static typing affects only a certain class of bugs, the confusion of one variable with another. But bugs related to passing the wrong variable to a function are not that common. Much more common is a variable that's unexpectedly None/null, but here Java behaves exactly like Python does. In web applications, a small number of errors can be traced to integers vs numeric strings, which strong typing would help, but this has to be weighed against the significant burden of adding typedefs everywhere and not being able to use flexible-type constructs. But of course, none of this will convince the die-hards. Yet there are an increasing number of programmers who use both static- and dynamic-typed languages. A stronger argument for static typing is its easier convertability to machine language. -- Mike Orr <[email protected]> --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pylons-discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pylons-discuss?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
