By gst
via xoltar.org
Published: Jul 12 2007 / 16:09
In a recent piece called Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing, noted programmer and author Bruce Eckel makes an argument that dynamically typed languages such as Python are superior to statically typed languages such as Java and C++. I've done quite a bit of Python and Java programming, and even a little C++, so I can appreciate his position, but I think the conclusion goes too far. Whether Python is more productive than C++ or Java is one thing, whether static typing in general should be abandoned is quite another.
Comments
in86835 replied ago:
This seems a seriously flawed argument is for python, academic languages (who cares!) and for broken use of interfaces. Interface should be regarded as static types too, so that you are told by the compiler when a interface method tweak is is no longer compatible with you classes, no test needed to spot this in Java! Type inference can make for subtle and nasty bugs, so you have to right more boring (and possibly buggy) code to check it, what a stupid waste of time!
I have used python apps on Linux and Windows (yumex etc.), had all kinds of stupid versioning issues (which I never see with Java), performance issues and excessive memory use, so given a choice, I would avoid python apps and any other apps in a poorly typed scripting language.
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