dynamic typing questions

[Mark Dufour]

> The other programmer here is very concerned about
> dynamic typing though in Python.  He feels like this
> would be too much of a hinderance on us and too easy
> for us to make a mistake and not catch it until
> runtime making debugging harder.

I'm personally convinced that the increase in productivity, compactness of
code in Python and long-term maintainability, among other things
usually far outweigh the lack of static typing. Static typing tends to
only catch some syntactical bugs on the surface, leaving the hard ones for
the programmer. There is a nice article about this topic by Bruce Eckel
(who subsequently wrote the books Thinking in C++, Thinking in Java, and
who is now working on Thinking in Python.) He explains why unit tests are
often better for catching the hard bugs, while of course this does not
require static type checking.. ;)

http://www.mindview.net/WebLog/log-0025

You can find some other nice articles about Python by Bruce Eckel here as
well. IMO the only disadvantage of Python versus Java and C++ is the
comparatively slow execution speed.. but this is being addressed. I know
I'm hooked!


Mark Dufour.
--
'Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did.' - Linus
Torvalds