From: Clifford Heath Date: 2003-11-21T08:43:37+09:00 Subject: Re: "stereotyping" Julian Fitzell wrote: > Wow! That's quite the troll! - I think I'll bite. Sorry, it probably was a bit OTT. Interesting though that most of the apps listed are either inhouse dev't or products sold to generate support (customisation) revenue - like large trading apps for example. My experience is with designing and extending large software products (>1MLOC) over dozens of upgrade cycles and six+ years, where you gather a large base of legacy code and entrenched design faults, with a need for backward compatibility and migration at every release, with teams of 10-30 engineers (not super-large, but enough that central review and control is quite hard), most of whom have been working on the product for less than half its life. I've done this three times now. 9 months on a project doesn't really count. Problems arise over 9 years when you can't provide hands-on support for customer upgrades. I can't see how I'd do that with any fully dynamic language without even optional typing. Not Ruby, definitely not Smalltalk, though both are superlative in some fields. That doesn't mean I'm happy with the languages I *have* used however, I think the computer language field has a *long* way to go yet. Wish I had time to write Rite :-) Ruby's so good, and Rite is such a good opportunity for significant further improvement. > If for some > reason, it still wasn't clear, I could easily put in a comment > explaining what was expected but I can't think of a time recently where > that has been necessary. That is indeed the mark of a good language - it communicates by itself without the need for comments. However, the lack of method typing in both R&S limit the amount of information that can be included without adding comments, and that's a pity when so much else is right. Note that it's only partly about what the compiler can check, it's mainly about what the human can apprehend. Clifford.