[ruby-talk:16894] Re: Something strange with Ruby's inheritance mechanism

At 01:55 AM 6/26/01 , Aleksei Guzev wrote:
>Strong typing shortens development of large project involving large
>stuff.

Many Lisp and Smalltalk programmers would disagree. 

Although I was a Lisp programmer for several years, I always had a sneaking
preference for static typing that only went away recently. You get
expressive power from dynamic typing that is quite hard with static typing.
The compile-time error checking you lose is mostly easily regained with
faithful unit testing. Unit testing might seem a big price to pay, but I'd
be doing test-first design anyway for other reasons. So the lack of strong
typing is only an intermittent annoyance, outweighed by the benefits. 

Here's an interesting read about how Yahoo Stores benefited from the use of
Common Lisp, in particular some of the features that seem to crop up in
dynamically-typed but not statically-typed languages:
<http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html>
More technical details (but still not enough):
<http://www.paulgraham.com/lwba.html>



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