Interview at Lang.NEXT

[bearophile via Digitalmars-d-announce]

Nick Sabalausky:

> In my experience, using heavy dynamic typing throughout a 
> program creates far more work (mainly debugging) than it 
> avoids. Even in tiny ~100 line programs, I've spent large 
> amounts of time tracking down bugs a sane compiler would have 
> immediately pointed out with a comparatively negligible amount 
> of my effort spent on typing.

I think often this happens because you are trying to write 
Python/Ruby code like you are using C++/Java, you assume the 
compiler will catch certain kinds of bugs. If you write Python 
with the kind of coding Python requires, taking more care of the 
things the Python interpreter is not able to spot for you, you 
will use much less time to debug Python code, and the overall 
coding time will be quite low. In Python you write 2-3 lines of 
tests every 1 line of code, and you test every functions for the 
corner cases you can think of. You don't write more than few 3-6 
lines of code without testing them immediately. So for certain 
aspects you need more discipline to write Python, while for other 
things it needs less. For small and medium programs this leads to 
sufficiently correct Python code :-) It's usually quite hard to 
explain such differences in coding stile to people that are used 
to static typing.

Bye,
bearophile