From: jm <jeffm@...>
Date: 2005-08-02T10:58:59+09:00
Subject: Re: lowering ruby's reach

Can't remember if I've seen this before or not. A couple of comments, 
done quickly while doing other things,

* Don't get me started on templates. That's what's causing me headaches 
at the moment. I'm trying to re-write something I originally had in 
ruby into C++.

* The strong/weak static/dynamic manifest/implicit argument seems to 
take diametrically opposing points of view. Is it possible that there's 
a third side to this argument?

* I like the point made in the article that algorithmic correctness is 
not guaranteed by typing (weak or strong).

* For some reason I keep typing string when I mean strong. :^).

* I suppose what I was thinking with the language_profile email was 
signaling to interpreter/compiler what optimisations and checks it 
can/should run at a particular level in the code rather than or 
necessarily on the entire body of code.

good quote from article, Guido van Rossum says,

   You can also easily write a small piece of code in Python and see 
that it works. You can
   do very fine-grained unit testing. Bottom-up program development 
works really well. You
   can easily start with only a vague idea of what you want, start to 
implement it, and see
   how well it works so far. You can then change many things around. If 
you have a strongly
   typed language, changing things around becomes much more painful.

this equally applies to ruby.

I'll have to read to comments/article more fully sometime.

Jeff.

On 02/08/2005, at 11:11 AM, Gene Tani wrote:

> Jim Gosling and Guide van Rossum's interviews on Artima had lots of
> follow-up discussions.  Everybodyy's got different ideas about what
> static/dynamic/strong/weak typing is,
>
> http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=32&thread=3572
>
>