From: Robert Church <rc@...>
Date: 2003-10-18T05:58:40+09:00
Subject: Re: OT: Strict typing on large projects

On Sat, Oct 18, 2003 at 05:41:03AM +0900, Michael Campbell quipped:
> "What I would love to see is a 100,000+ lines project written in PHP 
> being mantained by one or two developers. You can't do that without 
> strict typing."

(a) PHP is a poor language for a number of reasons.

(b) Since this is a ruby list, it's important to note that Ruby *is
not* weakly typed. It is dynamically typed. C is an examply of a
weakly typed language, in that, for instance, you can assign a
character to an integer, and the character data will then be treated
as an integer value. This cannot happen in Ruby.

(c) In dynamically typed languages, you can do a lot more with 100,000
lines than you can in statically typed languages. 100,000 lines is
often simply not necessary. Also, see Greenspun's 10th Law.  

   "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an
    ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half
    of Common Lisp."

(d) There are certainly such projects out there. Zope is gigantic,
though I don't know off the top of my head *how* gigantic it is. There
are huge, industrial size Lisp and Smalltalk apps in the world
cranking out payrolls and trading stocks as we speak. The idea that
*real programs are written in statically typed languages* is a recent
innovation and lacks any basis in truth.