I believe it was gnat (I can't find the quote now) who said something along the lines of, "Strong typing prevents you from making mistakes you just never make".
As a followup to that, I'm posting a nice quote from Dave Thomas (of Pragmatic Programmer fame) in response to James Britt (also a nice guy) regarding strong typing. Although Dave is talking about Ruby here, I think it applies to Perl and Python as well.
On May 17, 2004, at 22:52, James Britt wrote:
> One (possible, and not mine) argument against duck typing is that you
> are essentially required to write assorted unit tests beyond checking
> for operationally correct behavior; the compilation step for a
> staticly typed language offers these (albeit compulsory) "unit tests"
> for free.
No one requires you to do this. Instead, you do this if you feel uncomfortable with your code. After a while, you stop feeling uncomfortable, and realize that all this type discussion is simply a red herring, and get back to writing proper code and the tests to test it. A few months after that, you're surprised when you realize that you haven't had a single type-related error.
This is simple a question of experience. When you first start out, you feel exposed because Ruby doesn't let you add type annotations to variables (I know I did). Knowing that it worked OK in Smalltalk, I made the conscious decision not to fight this, but instead to see how it worked just doing it the Ruby way. It was hard at first, and I kept fighting some inner demon who wanted me to add "kind_of?" calls everywhere. But after a while, I realized that my code was no less accurate than it was in Java, and that I didn't really need the type information. Once I overcame that fear, I suddenly realized that I could also get a lot of benefit from the flexibility: the realization that type != class, but rather that type equals capabilities was a revelation, and it has fundamentally changed the way I code.
the realization that type != class, but rather that type equals capabilities was a revelation, and it has fundamentally changed the way I code.
If only there were some way the compiler could check that for you.
