Typing system vs. Java

[brueckd at tbye.com]

On Tue, 31 Jul 2001, Peter Milliken wrote:

> I have used a very strongly typed language (Ada), I haven't tried Haskall or
> Ocaml as one repondent mentioned, but I claim that with Ada, 95-98% of
> "normal" bugs are out of my programs once I get the compiler to produce
> executable code. The only bugs that are left are the purely logic bugs.

Only 2-5% of your bugs are purely logical!? While I'd agree that once your
compiler produces executable code the bugs left are of the logical
variety, that number seems incredibly low (or the number of bugs you
initially have is ridiculously high ;-) ). Back to the topic: how much of
this would you attribute to Ada's use of types versus its very thorough
compiler (that checks a wide range of problems, not all of which may be
type-related).

> Once you have used a truly strongly typed language, then you would
> never consider doing a large job (multiple programmers) in anything
> else. I love and use Python, but anything more than a one man job
> would see me turfing it for a better suited language. Sometimes I
> think that even the idea of using Python may be a mistake because the
> number of hours I have spent chasing down code bugs in my Python
> programs that would have been caught by a decent typed language
> compiler are too numerous to count :-).

Excellent! You seem to have what I was looking for from the initial
poster: a specific example. Can you post one please? I'd really like to
better understand your perspective. Thanks!

-Dave