Re: Type declarations problematic?

Maciej Sobczak <no.spam@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Hi,

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/10/12.html

"[it] seems to be that itʼs explicit typing, where the programmer is
asked to declare the type of things, that leads to most of the problems.

[...] itʼs starting to look like type declarations are one of those
accidental difficulties that good programming languages can eliminate."


It is obvious that there is a place for dynamically typed languages, but
the above statements seem to be a bit too far-fetched. Do they mean that
"typeless" languages will just suck some of the Java audience (fine for
me), or is it maybe a more general problem that will drive the evolution
of programming languages further away from strongly typed systems?
Do you plan a switch to Ruby? ;-)

I don't know. But note that the opposite of "programmer is asked to
declare the type of things" is not necessarily dynamic typing. There's
also type inference, as in SML, OCaml, Haskell, all of which are strong
statically-typed languages where you don't have to declare the types of
all the variables.

- Bob
.

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