A Pragmatic Case for Static Typing

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 10:41 PM, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:
> In article <7xfvtnwsn9.fsf at ruckus.brouhaha.com>,
>  Paul Rubin <no.email at nospam.invalid> wrote:
>
>> "Russ P." <Russ.Paielli at gmail.com> writes:
>> > I just stumbled across this video and found it interesting:
>> > http://vimeo.com/72870631
>> > My apologies if it has been posted here already.
>>
>> The slides for it are here, so I didn't bother watching the 1 hour video:
>>
>>   http://gbaz.github.io/slides/hurt-statictyping-07-2013.pdf
>
> Thank you for posting that.
>
> My favorite slide (especially since for the past few years, I've mostly
> worked in 3 person teams).
>
>> Brian's Observation:
>>
>> At 3 people on a team, there is a 50% chance that
>>> at least one of them is a full-time idiot.

My favorite too. I was reading it on the bus and I cracked up loudly
enough to draw some looks from fellow passengers.

I currently work on a two-person team (the boss/owner and me, nobody
else), reduced from three-person a year and a bit ago by the departure
of our full-time idiot. Since then, my boss and I have completely
rewritten *EVERY* piece of code he contributed to the project; for the
bulk of the project we weren't using source control (I recommended it,
boss reckoned we didn't need it) and just did our own separate
subprojects (I worked on the back end, our resident idiot had control
of the PHP and Javascript front end). Boss now thinks it'd be worth
rehiring the guy, because he had a recommendation/decision batting
record of pretty much .000, so we should ask his advice and then do
the opposite. (I'm still waiting for my boss to notice that it was
Idiot (btw, his moniker, not mine, used in a number of commit messages
removing his code) who recommended that we use PHP.)

Yep. Full-time idiot. Though this may be an extreme and
unusually-literal example.

ChrisA