From: Simon Kitching <simon@...>
Date: 2003-11-20T14:40:04+09:00
Subject: Re: "stereotyping"

On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 15:54, Michael Campbell wrote:
> > Well, I'm a senior developer/team leader. I have been considering
> moving
> > the team from "c" to ruby. However I have doubts that the
> lower-level
> > programmers can handle development without any type-checking
> support. So
> > we will probably move to either Java or c#.
> 
> What do you think you need to protect them /from/, exactly?

No, it's more to protect me!

It's to protect me from questions like:

"Hey, what kind of object is this method expecting? It isn't documented
anywhere and I can't understand the source code".

"Hey, I'm getting this message from the XXX library about do_foo not
existing on parameter bar. I must be doing something wrong. How do I fix
it?"

"Hey, I'm supposed to fix this library method. What parameters are
people allowed to pass to it?"

and the corollary question:

"Hey, your team isn't making much progress on this project, despite this
Ruby language you suggested. Why shouldn't I fire you?"