Comments on: Return of the Statically Typed Languages

By: Mike Jennings

Mike Jennings — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 15:44:02 +0000

Interesting and well written article, thanks! I’m definitely in the “strongly typed” camp, but as I get older, I suspect that the whole “typed vs. dynamic” thing is a matter of taste (and possibly religion). I would be curious to find out what (if any) correlation there is between age and language preference.
The old farts that I know tend to be fans of strongly typed languages, whereas the young brilliant people tend to love dynamic languages (with extra syntactic sugar please!)

By: Mireya

Mireya — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 16:12:44 +0000

This article was written in 2008. And although it might have been written in the stars that Statically Typed Languages would return, de facto evidence since proved it wasn’t to be the case. We can’t always be right. No worries!

By: Tony Morris

Tony Morris — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:30:02 +0000

Ignacio,
Sorry for the late reply. I hope you receive this.
I think it is pretty clear that Cedric is wrong on many points here and I’m happy that others have seen through it. I’d be interested in taking the matter further with you privately if you like. I’m not much interested in “having it out” on a public forum such as this, where learning and discussion can easily get out of hand.
Cheers.

By: Curt Sampson

Curt Sampson — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:37:17 +0000

“…all our hardly [sic] earned knowledge about side effects is going down the drain again.”
I know you meant “hard earned,” but I read it, due to the typo, as “hardly learned,” and that might even be a better way of putting it.
cjs@cynic.net

By: Lee

Lee — Fri, 23 May 2008 13:58:19 +0000

Ignacio said something that I think bears on all the discussion. He said programming was 10% coding, 40% debugging and 40% staring at other peoples code.
Of course, I would break it up a little differently but my key difference is the time spent thinking. So here goes: 10% coding, 30% debugging, 30% thinking about what other peoples code does (and staring at it) and 30% thinking about what the code should do and how it should work.
Several points:
1) You don’t spend much time typing so the number of keys pressed doesn’t much matter.
2) You spend time reading, so the number of characters to read doesn’t much matter if you can fit it in about one screen view.
3) You spend a lot of time figuring out what old code does. This can either mean you’re hosed because someone can write unreadable code in any language. Or it can mean a language should encourage and allow readable code.
4) You spend a lot of time debugging so the tools surrounding a language (along with the language constructs) need to make it easy to debug. Debugging in my dictionary includes everything from static analyzers to runtime single-stepping and breakpoints to print statements (i.e. logging).
5) Finally, because you spend a lot of time thinking about what to do, a programmer has to invest in themself which is totally independent of the language features.
One more thing, I suspect anyone out of university for more than 2 years has written 200 lines of unreadable code in more than one language. It seems to me that is part of our education process. We see how to write unreadable code. We see how hard it makes our job in the future. We change the way we do things to avoid it. (Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I hold my arm over my head like this … Well, don’t hold your arm that way.)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:30:04 +0000

List> tasks = new ArrayList>();
too frequent

By: daredevil

daredevil — Mon, 19 May 2008 22:10:48 +0000

Can you please put that ruby code here ? So it could be analyzed.

By: Carl Gundel

Carl Gundel — Mon, 19 May 2008 12:44:24 +0000

“I found myself in this very predicament when trying to improve a Ruby program that 1) I just wrote a few days before and 2) is 200 lines long. I was staring at an object, trying to remember what it does, failing, searching manually in emacs where it was declared, found it as a “Hash”, and then realized I still had no idea what the darn thing is. You see my point…”
I can’t believe you use that as an anecdote. How can you write a 200 line program in a high level language and then blame the language because you don’t understand what it does? Try again.

By: James Robertson

James Robertson — Mon, 19 May 2008 08:52:32 +0000

“What will keep preventing dynamically typed languages from displacing statically typed ones in large scale software is not performance, it’s the simple fact that it’s impossible to make sense of a giant ball of typeless source files, which causes automatic refactorings to be unreliable, hence hardly applicable, which in turn makes developers scared of refactoring. And it’s all downhill from there. Hello bit rot.
I hate giving anecdotal evidence to support my points, but that won’t stop me from telling a short story that happened to me just two weeks ago: I found myself in this very predicament when trying to improve a Ruby program that 1) I just wrote a few days before and 2) is 200 lines long. I was staring at an object, trying to remember what it does, failing, searching manually in emacs where it was declared, found it as a “Hash”, and then realized I still had no idea what the darn thing is. You see my point..”
To be honest, if you have this level of problem, you shouldn’t be writing code. Period.

By: Sony Mathew

Sony Mathew — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:54:44 +0000

Nice…I have to say. I always wanted to see you and Yegge go at this topic. I was very impressed with your arguments (and i’m not easily impressed). I hope you will include an additional argument at your Jazoon presentation around how Static Typing provides for an assertive/defensive or contractual style of programming that is very beneficial toward “proving” execution correctness – as I commented on Yegge’s blog.
Its too bad Yegge took your comment badly regarding “common sense use of a mainstream language”. Yes there are Perl, Ruby shops – but they too most likely maintain just one language standard in their shop. It is indeed just common sense and it does not dismiss in anyway these shops or their use of a dynamic language as their shop standard.