An unspeakable act

[James Logajan]

Aahz Maruch wrote:
> Jeremy Henty <jeremy at chaos.org.uk> wrote:
> > Daniel Klein <danielk at aracnet.com> writes:
> >>
> >>This person says that dynamically typed languages produce bug-ridden
> >>programs
> >
> >Then this person will be distressed to learn that Java is effectively
> >dynamically typed!
> >
> >See http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/cgi-local/pragprog?JavaIsUntyped !
> 
> !!!
> 
> That is seriously interesting.

Hmmm. Any language design that aspires to allow programmers the ability to
express algorithms independent of the type of object to which it may be
applied, such as containers, must at some level provide typeless handles. In
C/C++ those handles are typically (void *). In Java they are typically
Object references. In Python they are most all variables.

The criticism of Python that would be most appropriate isn't that it is
dynamically typed, since it is too productive a concept for a modern
language not to provide, but that it is dynamically typed even when it makes
no sense to do that.

But I like Python just as it is. Excessive semicolons, curly brackets,
begin/end tokens, pre-and-postfix character appendages to variables, and
type declarations are all syntactic cruft that can seriously slow new code
development.