By jeervin92
via iacobus.blogspot.com
Published: Jun 30 2008 / 20:06
I don't think the use of statically typed or dynamically typed language is particularly useful or informative. I think a much better term is 'implicitly typed' or 'explicitly typed'. I go into alot more detail in the blog entry referenced in the link. I am a groovy proponent so all the examples compare Java and Groovy, but I would love to hear from people using dynamically/implicitly typed languages on the JVM in general.
Comments
paul_houle replied ago:
dynamic/static is one axis (is it done at compile time or run time) and explicit/implicit is another. Languages also vary in how implicit they are... "var" in C# does a lot less than type inference does in oCaml/F#
jeervin92 replied ago:
Yes I think I tend to agree with you. There has been alot of chat about the entry on my blog. I think that there are several ways I would now rewrite the article to emphasize. First off, that implicit/explicit is another almost orthogonal axis. Secondly, the point of the blog entry was to emphasize a language from the developer's perspective. Finally, you cannot separate the discussion without consideration of the tooling available, in particular in the IDE for the language.
fadzlan replied ago:
Static --> Compile time
Dynamic --> Run time
Explicit --> Compiler makes the choice of type at compile time based on what was explicitly written (Duh!)
Implicit --> Compiler makes the choice of type at compile time based what was inferred rather than explicitly written.
antych replied ago:
already submitted http://www.dzone.com/links/dont_call_it_a_static_or_dynamic_language.html
can you people stop voting every single thing without reading?
jeervin92 replied ago:
When I wrote this blog entry I was looking at explicit/implicit from the programmer's view point, how much does the programmer has to have in his head to do work? I think that a language that has inferred types could still be considered somewhat explicit, if tooling exists to assist the developer when he/she is working. An explicit language allows for things like code browsing, implicit languages have little better than grep.
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