Who's minister of propaganda this week?

[Michael Chermside]

Paul Prescod wrote:

>                     ...[snip]...
> 
>> (But see Alex's response, where he argues that perhaps it DOES hurt,
>> for other reasons.)
> 
> 
> I think it takes a lot of work with both kinds of languages to recognize
> that you lose something significant in exchange for the earlier error
> messages. And I think that slowly over the next few years, programmers
> are going to to come to that realization.

Well, most of my experience has been in staticly typed languages. I
suspect that even in dynamically typed languages I tend to program
in a "static typed fashion". Do you have any suggestions of examples
of good code to read (or good books to read!) which would help me to
realize what kinds of advantages I can get from dynamic typing?

> It is highly akin to the GC situation. A few years back, garbage
> collection of any sort was considered unaffordable for real apps (even
> in the face of evidence to the contrary) merely because most programmers
> did not have real-world experience with it. Now, nobody designs a new
> language without GC. Of course it wasn't all just education. Moore's law
> helped too. The situation is the same with dynamic typing. Moore's law
> and education will bring programmers over.

Hmm... the first time I ever heard of GC I immediately said to myself,
"Aha! That's the way to go!". But I'm still working at figuring out the
advantages of dynamic typing.

-- Michael Chermside

> 


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