The current practice of software development may be more "like a craft or an art form" than engineering - and that was true of other forms of engineering in the past. There isn't a large body of knowledge that one needs to master to become a software engineerThere isn't a large body of knowledge for software development - wouldn't that suggest...

Is there an elegant solution for this problem in Java and C#, or is this just something we have to live with in statically-typed languages? No & No (ok, I've not thought about it & No)Seems like some of those overloaded methods could go away in Nice (a statically typed OO language that compiles to Java bytecodes).Nice methods may have...

Thank you for motivating me to re-read the The Mythical Man Month, and watch the Turing Award lecture."The Design of Design" lecture seemed to about Engineering Design. One message was that engineering design is not the orderly process we sometimes like to think. The comment wasn't about how to achieve good design.Product process raises the...

I'm glad someone is questioning the rhetoric :-)Type Inference in MLMy understanding is just about good enough to follow this explanation "Understanding why Ocaml doesn't support operator overloading"http://caml.inria.fr/archives/200211/msg00347.htmlClean & Haskell take a different approach and support operator overloading. Which means that...

it is the client who specifies the need. Professional programmers do their best to meet that needThat seems stunningly conventional and agreeable ;-)(Mentioning that the programmers shit-o-meter is subservient to the customers needs would have made the polemic less stirring, although it might have been nice to mention the client somewhere, even...

A word to the wise, it may be days before you remerge from the wiki ;-)Static Typing http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?StaticTypingDynamic Typing http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DynamicTypingBenefits of Dynamic Typing http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BenefitsOfDynamicTypingBenefits of Dynamic Typing Discussion http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BenefitsOfDynamicTypingDiscussion

Pity the client who desired less than the conscience of the programmer dictated must be done!Pity the client who desired measurable quality beyond that which satisfied the conscience of the programmer!

Contrary to some claims (notably from Bruce Eckel) Seems like the use of terminology in "Type Checking and Techie Control" was a bit lax. It reads like Bruce Eckel was commenting on other peoples mis-application of weak typing to Python (rather than supporting that usage).Frank Mitchell brought some clarity to this back in February (in the...

compromise the quality of our workHmmm doesn't seem to me that quality is an absolute - we can provide the quality level the client desires.I will *ship shit*- whenever it provides value to the client- openly and with the client's knowledge

I think both static and dynamic typing have their merits and are not mutually exclusive. I'd like to see a language that has both. Try these for both static and dynamic typing:Dylan http://www.functionalobjects.com/Claire http://claire3.free.fr/description.htm

rehash of the same old languagesnew way of solving the challenges of professional programming?Professional programming covers a lot of ground, which bit are you concerned with? What are the problems that you face using "the same old languages"?Ever used functional programming languages like Haskell?

Smalltalk is the first language to introduce the concept of metaclassSmalltalk-72 didn't have metaclasses. They were introduced with Smalltalk-80.Seehttp://www.ifi.unizh.ch/richter/Classes/oose2/05_Metaclasse s/02_smalltalk/02_metaclasses_smalltalk.html

An example is multithreadingHere's a bad broken analogy-Erlang by design supports massive concurrency.Java by design supports OO.Compared to Erlang, doing multi-threading in Java is like doing OO in VB5.imagine doing complicated query code in JavaSee select-from-where on p10 of "Unifying Tables, Objects and Documents"Wouldn't a complicated in...

For mission critical and safety-conscious systems... reliabilityThe important thing here is what reliability means for each specific system. Dynamically-typed Smalltalk has been used to develop mission critical, reliable systems for many investment banks. What made the systems reliable is that they didn't crash & burn when there was a...

one VM-based strongly typed language (Java, C#, Smalltalk, etc.)Smalltalk is strongly typed, but at run-time not at compile-time - it's a dynamically typed language.