Popular conceit about learning programming languages

[Alexander Schmolck]

"Donn Cave" <donn at u.washington.edu> writes:

> If there's one thing that makes Python a bad choice for me, that's it.
> During development, static type systems save me a lot of trouble.

Have you tried pychecker? I'm not sure what sort of troubles static type
systems save you from, but at least for the relatively trivial but common
cases like typos, pychecker seems to do quite a good job.

On the whole, I think compulsory static typing is a bad idea. It invariably
seems to lead to spurious warnings and unnecessary code (partly because
typecheckers are usually quite daft and complain about correct code and partly
because it causes less flexible code) and longer development times. 

It would seem to me that most or all of the benfits of static typing can be
obtained from tools.

alex