Who's minister of propaganda this week?

[Nicola Musatti]

Hi,
I'm a Python curious not yet sold to the advantages of typeless
languages; I tend to think that typelessness is suited to a set of tasks
that has only a limited overlap with the tasks for which static typing
is preferable. I have a question and a provocation for you.

Cameron Laird wrote:
> 
> In article <98nu1m$12e at dispatch.concentric.net>,
> Phlip  <phlip_cpp at my-deja.com> wrote:
>                         .
> >Robert C. Martin meant two things. A> If you write wall-to-wall unit tests
> >when you code, if you use a typeless language you will add bullet-proof
> >features faster than if you use a statically typed language, even though
> >the former has less built-in error checking at type conversion time. The
> >latter supports refactoring easier.

But those things that the compiler used to check for you may well have
become new tests for you to write: if the trade-off between the decrease
in actual code size and the increase in test number is negative, even
the better support for refactoring turns out to be an illusion. 

[...]
>   Expressiveness ... is a far better aid to
>   correctness ...

Here I'm puzzled, but maybe it's only a "language" problem. What do you
mean by "Expressiveness"? I ask because until now I thought
expressiveness was an advantage of strongly typed languages (namely,
C++) over typeless ones.

Best regards,
Nicola Musatti