From: Elliott Hughes <ehughes@...>
Date: 2004-03-11T01:10:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Duck typing chapter

> > Bjarne Stroustrup: http://www.artima.com/intv/abstreffi2.html
> 
> Yes - I saw it, but I don't buy (most of) it. OCaml is efficient too.

Those who haven't read the article will at this point assume that Stroustrup
talks at great length about efficiency; in actual fact, he mentions it as an
aside, as his final point on a long list. Without wanting to read too much
into this, I'd suggest that he considers all the points he makes before that
to be more important.

> Martin Fowler has an interesting blog piece on "enabling vs. directing" 
> (http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SoftwareDevelopmentAttitude.html) which 
> addresses the point.

My mention of reflection was to point out that static typing is not as
non-enabling as it's often presented. Behind which lies a serious point: a
useful chapter, that would be a strong selling point of Pickaxe2, would be
one that explains to static typers how to cope in a dynamic-typing world. I
think such things might be useful to Ruby programmers too; Smalltalk
programmers seemed more adept at coping, and their programs more
understandable (but then their distfix method syntax let them use parameter
names to give type information).

-- 
Elliott Hughes, BlueArc Engineering