Interview at Lang.NEXT

[Atila Neves via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Thursday, 5 June 2014 at 13:34:03 UTC, Brian Rogoff wrote:
> On Thursday, 5 June 2014 at 12:46:24 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
>> I don't know, but the only language I've used with no static 
>> types that made me comfortable was Common Lisp. That was a 
>> long time ago, but I think it was the ease of manually testing 
>> the code in a REPL that did it. Obviously today I'd write unit 
>> tests anyway.
>>
>> Atila
>
> There are languages with good static type systems (OCaml, F#, 
> Scala, to name a few) that have REPLs as well, and they're 
> quite useful there too.

Oh, I know. There's also this: http://drepl.dawg.eu/

My point was that, way back when nearly 20 years ago, manually 
testing the Common Lisp code I wrote one function at a time was 
probably the reason I was ok with not having static types. I'm 
not even sure I'd feel the same way now.

> I'm fond of Lisp, and I think Lisp macros are very powerful and 
> useful. I like Python's (really ISWIM's) indentation sensitive 
> syntax. But, as someone who uses 'dynamically typed' languages 
> daily, I think static typing is a huge win and don't understand 
> why anyone would not want to use a language with static types, 
> especially if they were mostly inferred and so the annotation 
> burden was minimal. ML is the language of the future ;-)

Yep, inferred types are a massive win in my book. Having to 
explicitly write types whenever I have the misfortune of writing 
C or old C++ is painful after C++11, D, and the very little 
Haskell I've done so far.

Atila