[Chicago] Python for mortgages???

[Skip Montanaro]

On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:08 AM, Rob Kapteyn <robkapteyn at gmail.com> wrote:
> Python is NOT "weakly typed".
> It is "strongly, dynamically typed".
> Once Python determines the type of an object -- it does not change.
>
> Weakly typed languages (like Perl) often create horrible bugs in production
> when real-world data gets
> cast into an unexpected type.  This has given "weak typing" a (deservedly)
> bad reputation.
>
> These bugs never happen with Python.

I will back this up with an example.  I suspect I have outed it here
at least once in the past. If you've seen this before, my apologies.
Just hit 'D'...

Way BITD, I wrote and maintained an online concert calendar.  When I
first started, the frontend and backend were both written in Python.
Our technology was eventually bought by another small company whose
frontend was written in Perl.  Merging the two wasn't terribly
difficult, as my frontend and backend communicated using XML-RPC.
Problem was, I expected band/musician names to be represented as
strings.  Very early in the process, the Perl frontend coerced the
band name "311 <http://www.311.com/band>" to a number.  Hilarity
ensued in the backend.
Initially, I had no control over the frontend software, so I wound up
special-casing such issues at the interface of the backend.

Skip
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