Comments on: Test versus Type

By: Markus GÃ¤lli

Markus GÃ¤lli — Sat, 02 Oct 2004 05:17:24 +0000

Very true.
Maybe you want to look on my workshop paper for oopsla 2004:
(Workshop on Revival of Dynamic Languages)
“One-Method Commands: Linking Methods and Their Tests”
http://pico.vub.ac.be/~wdmeuter/RDL04/papers/Gaelli.pdf

By: Isaac Gouy

Isaac Gouy — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 02:50:46 +0000

Joe wrote: “Python’s list comprehensions, for example, are a huge timesaver – there’s no real reason stuff like that would be incompatible with an ETL. I wonder why someone doesn’t write a productivity-focused ETL…”

Slightly surprised that Oliver didn’t mention Haskell’s list comprehensions, Clean’s array comprehensions…

By: Isaac Gouy

Isaac Gouy — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 02:44:43 +0000

“The received wisdom among ETL fans is that what you get for this extra time is error checking”

So are there really explicitly-typed-language fans or are they statically-checked-language fans? (The latter.)

By: Isaac Gouy

Isaac Gouy — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 02:27:03 +0000

Strangely you’ve fixated on whether or not types are part of the language syntax - most people fixate on when the language type checks: is the language statically-checked or dynamically-checked.

By: Isaac Gouy

Isaac Gouy — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 02:22:45 +0000

Pretty page!

“latent typing” “a weakly typed language”
Latent type is a synonym for implicit type.
Manifest type is a synonym for explicit type.

Strongly-typed / Weakly-typed don’t have much meaning. Where you say “strongly typed” you probably mean “type safe”.

http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/ page 205

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cardelli97type.html

By: Hero

Hero — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 15:55:26 +0000

Niccceee pagee

By: Eduardo Aguiar

Eduardo Aguiar — Wed, 27 Aug 2003 21:17:32 +0000

When we talk about development speed and correctness we cannot forget about the rule played by language’s syntax itself. How many lines of STL code would we write to do something similar to Python’s:

list = [1,2,3]
newlist = [i * i + 2 * i for i in list if i * i > 3]

Python has almost all features I would like to see in a programming language, and IMHO syntax is at least as important as implicitly-typed features.

By: Dutch guy speaking English

Dutch guy speaking English — Sat, 23 Aug 2003 16:59:20 +0000

Dynamic vs. static typing
Dynamic vs. static typing is a hot topic in computer programming lately. James Robertson points to an article by Oliver Steele on the subject. Although it is biased towards dynamic typing, it’s an interesting read and explains the different kinds…

By: Alex Peake

Alex Peake — Sat, 23 Aug 2003 02:15:04 +0000

Typing is no substitute for testing, and it can help.

Often missed is the technology of Type Inference. Here I do not manifestly state types, but the compiler will ensure that my Type implements the appropriate Interface.

I get the best of all worlds!

By: Joe Cheng

Joe Cheng — Sat, 23 Aug 2003 00:51:17 +0000

“I have been experimenting with Python for the past serveral months and am becoming convinced that it is much faster to get a program which works correctly than in C++. IMHO its part the type issue and part just better language design.”

I’ve come to similar conclusions with Ruby vs. Java (although the difference is much less dramatic if you consider IntelliJ part of the equation). I personally benefitted much less from the dynamic typing and much more due to Ruby’s far easier to use data structures, blocks, and regular expressions. Python’s list comprehensions, for example, are a huge timesaver – there’s no real reason stuff like that would be incompatible with an ETL. I wonder why someone doesn’t write a productivity-focused ETL…