The Industry choice

[Paul Rubin]

claird at lairds.us (Cameron Laird) writes:
> That is, while I have a LOT of respect for Paul's programming
> and judgment, and question myself when I'm on the side opposite
> him, I ultimately value type declarations in languages such as
> Java as more cost than benefit.

I don't find static type declarations to have much cost.  It's just a
few more keystrokes.  I'm open to persuasion about whether they have
benefit.  

I do believe that it's a horrible deficiency in Python that it has no
declarations at all, even optional ones, like "perl -w" or "use
strict".  Python's scoping hacks that result from the lack of
declarations just seem to me like pure insanity.

I was pretty skeptical of Java's checked exceptions when I first used
them but have been coming around about them.  There's just been too
many times when I wrote something in Python that crashed because some
lower-level function raised an exception that the upper level hadn't
been expecting, after the program had been in use for a while.  I'd
sure rather find out about that at compile time.