Re: Why I don't believe in static typing

From: Isaac Gouy (igouy_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 11/18/03 

Date: 18 Nov 2003 08:21:24 -0800

gat@jpl.nasa.gov (Erann Gat) wrote in message news:<gat-1711031658370001@192.168.1.51>...
> In article <h6sn81-5j2.ln1@ID-7776.user.dfncis.de>, Dirk Thierbach
> <dthierbach@gmx.de> wrote:

> > You guard against race conditions by careful programming, and by
> > planning in advance.
>
> Or by putting in run-time sanity checks. If I had had the foresight and
> the strength of my own convictions I would have put code into the biller
> that stopped the billing process immediately as soon as a request was made
> to bill a ridiculously high amount, for some value of "ridiculously
> high". That would have solved the problem too.
>
> Neither static nor dynamic typing would have helped in this situation.
> But I do believe that a dynamic typing *mindset* would have been more
> likely to produce a correct solution because it encourages you to think
> more about possible run-time errors.

Neither a static nor dynamic typing *mindset* would have helped,
that's clear as soon as you say "more likely to produce a correct
solution".

Maybe the interesting question is "How can we program systems which
behave in a reasonable manner in the presence of software errors?"

The Erlang community seems to have some coherent ideas about that
question.

(Thanks for starting a new discussion, the old thread had become
difficult to follow.)

best wishes, Isaac