Making D better than other programming languages (warning: rant, drivel)

[Sean Kelly]

Don Clugston wrote:
> Dave wrote:
>>
>> So I'm wondering if, in the grand scheme of things, dynamic typing 
>> really accounts for a 2.5x difference in productivity anyhow?
> 
> I suspect it doesn't scale very well. (Like not requiring you declare 
> variables -- looks great on a 10 or 20 line program, a complete disaster 
> on anything bigger).

This is why I don't like Lua, and it was a huge source of bugs for me 
there.  Any typo resulted in a new variable being created instead of an 
existing one being modified.  But I do think that dynamic typing is 
useful in the general case.  Ruby, for example.  If the object has the 
methods being called then it doesn't matter what the underlying type is, 
and if there is a mismatch (say, for expressions) then coercion is an 
option.  But even though Smalltalk works the same way (as far as I 
know), I'm not sure how the concept scales or how it affects 
provability.  I'll admit I still like having the compiler catch as many 
errors as possible, and in the extreme case, this form of type checking 
seems like it could allow bizarre mistakes to be made and for them to be 
extremely difficult to debug.


Sean