Dreaming of new generation IDE

[David Cournapeau]

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:18 PM, Adam Tauno Williams
<awilliam at opengroupware.us> wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-02-03 at 14:10 +0300, Vladimir Ignatov wrote:
>> Hello,
>> I am sitting here for quite some time, but usually keep silent ;-) I
>> use Python since 2003 both "professionally" and for my hobby projects
>> and love it a much.
>> I notice however, that "maintaining" existing/older python code is may
>> be not so enjoyable task. It may be even harder than supporting old
>> code written in some type of "static" languages (like Java or C++).
>> Surely "dynamic" nature of python comes with price.
>
> Yes, it certainly does.  Not that you'll get many Pythonistas to confess
> to that fact.  Somehow those who brag about the readability and
> expressiveness of source code just cannot admit that:

Static typing sounds "obviously" better only if you assume everything
else being equal. But the typing system also often goes in the way
when developing large codebases, when you need to refactor things,
etc... So if for a *given* codebase, you get type information, it is
almost certainly very helpful. But when you need to change this
codebase, maybe not so much.

There was a nice paper from people at Adobe which mentioned this very
aspect, focusing on how to maintain a significant codebase, from
prototype-kind of development to maintenance-kind of development:
http://www.ecmascript.org/es4/spec/evolutionary-programming-tutorial.pdf.
It strikes me as a good way to look at this tradeoff between static
and dynamic typing, where the dynamic typing for some "mostly frozen"
code areas has diminishing returns,

David