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Re: Programming with "Duh" Typing
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Posted: Jul 31, 2007 6:30 AM
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> If you've paid attention, the primary arguments, at least
> as posed by myself and James Watson, have been centered
> around how static typing saves time by:
> (1) Catching typos
> (2) Automating Refactoring
> (3) Increasing code clarity
And my replies to those arguments are:
(1) it's irrelevant because type errors in a dynamic system will be caught by the tests
(2) nothing that a good search & replace function can not do
(3) not really, especially in languages where lots of interfaces are involved (so you always see the interface, but not the implementation).
>
> If I mispell a function name in a dynamic language, I have
> to wait until something causes that codepath to be
> executed before I find that error. Yes, eventually it
> will be found. But it can take a long time to do it.
It seems to me that not all people run their code 100% all the time. If that is the case, then certainly, you are correct.
>
> Also, you have to remember that a lot of programming may
> go into a piece of software during system concept
> development before it becomes millions of lines of Ada.
>
> So let's say a systems engineer thinks he has a brilliant
> new nueral network architecture to use to distinguish
> troop transports from school buses. Long term the NN may
> be in software, an FPGA, an ASIC, or even some hybrid
> approach. But for now the engineer wants to figure out if
> it will actually work, so he codes it up in his favorite
> language and sets it to work on training data.
>
> A day and a half later the thing bombs out because in a
> rarely executed branch he typed inptu_vector instead of
> input_vector.
>
> That's not exactly fun...
So you mean the code that bombs out was not tested?
oh, the horror! :-)
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