PEP 3107 and stronger typing (note: probably a newbie question)

[sjdevnull at yahoo.com]

Stephen R Laniel wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 28, 2007 at 09:08:16AM +0200, Bruno Desthuilliers wrote:
> > You said ?
>
> I could link again to Mark-Jason Dominus, who writes that
> people often make the following inference:
>
> 1) C is strongly typed.
> 2) C's typing sucks.
> 3) Hence strong typing sucks.
>
> But I won't.
>
> It doesn't need to be a religious war. Why can't people just
> say "When strong typing is done and used well, it's a
> useful tool; when it's not, it's not"?

Python already has strong typing, much stronger than C and arguably
stronger than Java.  What it doesn't have is static typing, which is
good--that's one of the defining characteristics of the language, and
dynamic languages have a lot to recommend them.

ML and Haskell are also great languages, but they're great in a very
different way.  Lisp probably comes closest to a useful dynamic/static
hybrid, but there the static annotations are pretty much only for the
compiler's benefit, not the programmer's.