From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2001-12-11T09:36:11+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:28158] Re: The benefits of dynamic typing?

> From: Mark Hahn [mailto:mchahn@facelink.com]
> Sent: Monday, December 10, 2001 4:11 PM
>
> But my point was the arguments being made against this feature
> fell into the
> "protecting programmers from themselves" category which I have a
> big problem
> with.
>
> How does everyone else feel about "protecting programmers from
> themselves"?
> At what point does a compiler switch from being helpful to being a pain?
>
> I think this is the fundamental question behind this message thread.

In general I'm not real big on protecting programmers from themselves. When
these questions come up I think there is always a cost/benefit
consideration, and everyone is going draw the line a between cost and
benefit a little differently.

An obvious example that would draw little disagreement here if garbage
collection versus programmer controlled memory management. I'm sure we all
believe that the benefit is worth the cost. I do know a few people who do
not believe this (but they still like assembler coding, too).

in this particular example (concatenating strings with auto-conversion), I
personally see a lot of benefit and very little cost. I dare say that it
even follows the "principle of least surprise".

Curt