| Raffael Cavallaro 2007-07-30, 4:14 am |
| On 2007-07-30 01:29:05 -0400, Matthias Blume <find@my.address.elsewhere> said:
> In my experience (and I do have experience with both
> paradigms), I find it easier and faster to perform "exploratory"
> programming with a static type system to help me along.
But the static type system cannot help you with the fact that in an
interactive setting you cannot know the nature of the inputs (as humans
can be so clever), you cannot fully know the nature of the interactive
processing (ditto), and therefore cannot hope to know the nature of the
outputs (excluding the obvious reductio ad absurdum union type of
"bag-of-bits-of-unknow-type/types"). You'll have to check all of this
at runtime anyway.
You find static typing a support. I find it a hinderance. This is a
matter of personal taste (and I've said elswhere in this thread that
the relative popularities of c.l.l. and c.l.f. say somthing about where
most programmers' tastes in this matter lie). My main point is not
about taste, but about the liklihood that, for interactive computing,
where the future increasingly lies, the research into static typing has
been a major research effort in the wrong direction.
|