From: Paul Brannan <paul@...>
Date: 2002-03-08T23:56:39+09:00
Subject: Re: Interesting link on static/dynamic typing...

On Fri, Mar 08, 2002 at 05:34:43PM +0900, Robert Feldt wrote:
> ...relevant to Ruby compared to other languages discussion:
> 
> http://www.chimu.com/publications/short/whyDynamicTyping.html
> 
> Regards,
> 
> /Robert

Interesting.  The author starts with some rather odd claims about
needing lots of extra code in staticly typed languages, but I find his
number of 850% more hard to believe.  Templates in C++ help out nicely
here; afaik, Java has no such mechanism, and appears to be what the
author is familiar with.

Writing in a static-typed language does require more boilerplate code,
but certainly not on the order of 850% more.  The reason I write less
code in Ruby is because of Ruby's standard library more so than it is
because Ruby is dynamicly typed.

I'd be interested in seeing a comparison of C++ templates (or a similar
mechanism) with type-generic code in a dynamicly-typed language.  As
we've discussed before on the list, type-generic code that depends on
knowing the type of the object it is operating on is probably buggy
(this seems to be one of his complaints about staticly-typed langauges).

An interesting read, nonetheless.

Paul