Python from Wise Guy's Viewpoint

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters <mertz at gnosis.cx>:
| Joachim Durchholz <joachim.durchholz at web.de> writes:
|> My 100% subjective private study reveals not a single complaint about
|> over-restrictive type systems in comp.lang.functional in the last 12
|> months.
|
| I also read c.l.functional (albeit only lightly).  In the last 12
| months, I have encountered dozens of complaints about over-restrictive
| type sytems in Haskell, OCaml, SML, etc.
|
| The trick is that these complaints are not phrased in precisely that
| way.  Rather, someone is trying to do some specific task, and has
| difficulty arriving at a usable type needed in the task.  Often posters
| provide good answers--Durchholz included.  But the underlying complaint
| -really was- about the restrictiveness of the type system.
|
| That's not even to say that the overall advantages of a strong type
| system are not worthwhile--even perhaps better than more dynamic
| languages.  But it's quite disingenuous to claim that no one ever
| complains about it.  Obviously, no one who finds a strong static type
| system unacceptable is going to be committed to using, e.g.
| Haskell--the complaint doesn't take the form of "I'm taking my marbles
| and going home".

No one said that strict typing is free, requires no effort or learning
from the programmer.  That would be ridiculous - of course a type system
is naturally restrictive, that's its nature.  A restrictive system that
imposes a constraint on the programmer, who needs to learn about that
in order to use the language effectively.  `Over-restrictive' is
different.  If there are questions about static typing, it does not
follow that it's over-restrictive, nor that the questions constitute
a complaint to that effect.

	Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com