Could Python supplant Java?

[Nicola Musatti]

Peter Hansen wrote:
[...]
> I might have thought the same a year ago, but since then I've adopted
> test-driven development (TDD) which grew out of XP.  Refactoring like
> this becomes a breeze with a set of tests you can count on to check
> not only the types of your objects, when that's important, but also
> the logic, the inputs and outputs, and anything else that could
> reasonably fail.  With static typed languages, you get only the one
> fairly trivial type of checking.
> 
> TDD and Python are an *excellent* fit, since TDD benefits greatly from
> Python's very dynamic nature and flexilibity, while TDD supports
> Python almost perfectly in one area where it seems many feel it has
> a weakness - compile-time error checking.

So you rewrite a compiler worth of tests on each project? This almost
sounds as a good reason to stick to statically typed languages: at
least, half the tests have already been written for you.

Cheers,
Nicola Musatti