Re: another take on hackers and painters

[John Clements <address@hidden>]

On Tuesday, May 20, 2003, at 04:15  PM, mcguire@cs.utexas.edu wrote:

>> Clerical programmers [...] will not know what to do with the freedom
>> given by things such as dynamic typing.
>
> Ok, so I'm none too bright.  What exact freedoms do you get with 
> dynamic
> typing?  It seems like a type problem is going to result in a broken
> program either way, so you still have to think about types and making
> sure the right collection of stuff gets put in the right place.  The
> only real advantages I can see are:

...

Depends what you mean by "a type problem."  If I'm adding a number and 
a string, that's definitely a "type problem," and I'd like to catch it 
as soon as possible.  This is the great advantage of static type 
systems.  The flip side is that such systems typically rule out certain 
programs that _don't_ have "type problems".  Whether or not you want to 
write such programs plays a large part in determining what you think of 
statically typed languages.

john clements