Interview at Lang.NEXT

[John Colvin via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Thursday, 5 June 2014 at 13:32:16 UTC, Bill Baxter via 
Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 2:42 AM, Jonathan M Davis via 
> Digitalmars-d-announce
> <digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> Though I confess what horrifies me the most about dynamic 
>> languages is code
>> like this
>>
>> if(cond)
>>     var = "hello world";
>> else
>>     var = 42;
>>
>> The fact that an if statement could change the type of a 
>> variable is just
>> atrocious IMHO.
>
>
> Yeh, that's possible, but that doesn't look like something 
> anyone with any
> sense would do.
>
> The things I found most enjoyable about working on javascript 
> were
> 1) REPL / fully interactive debugger
>     When you hit a break point you can just start typing 
> regular js code
> into the console to poke the state of your system.
>     And the convenience of the REPL for seeing what bits of 
> code do as you
> write them.

That's an advantage of an interpreted language, regardless of 
typing.

> 2) Duck typing / introspection ability
>     If you have a bunch of objects that have a .width property, 
> and that's
> all you care about, you can just look for that.  No need to 
> declare an
> IWidthHaver interface and make all of your objects declare that 
> they
> implement it.


D's ranges are examples of this in a statically typed language. 
You don't care what the type of the range is, just so long as it 
has the right api.