Interview at Lang.NEXT

[Bruno Medeiros via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On 05/06/2014 08:30, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 6/5/14, 7:59 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> So let me get this straight: There are programmers out there who find
>> the occasional type annotations on some declarations to be significantly
>> more work than following a convention of nearly *quadrupling* the amount
>> of code they have to write? Two to three lines of tests for every one
>> line of real code is considered rapid development, "saving developer
>> time", "just getting things done", etc? And all that's considered a
>> "style" of coding?
>>
>> You're right, I really don't understand that style of coding at all. ;)
>>
>> Don't get me wrong, I am pretty big on unittests, but even still: If
>> people are trying to save developer time by replacing each minor type
>> annotation with several extra unittests (which are less reliable anyway
>> - greater room for human error), then something's gone horribly wrong.
>>
>>  > It's usually quite hard to explain such
>>  > differences in coding stile to people that are used to static typing.
>>  >
>>
>> That doesn't surprise me. It's also very difficult to explain 2+2==5 to
>> people who are accustomed to basic arithmetic. ;)
>
> I have to confess this echoes a few similar confusions I have about the
> use and advocacy of dynamically-typed languages. One argument I've heard
> a while back was that static type errors are not "proportional response"
> and that static types only detect the most trivial of bugs, so why
> bother at all. But then the heavy-handed approach to unittesting
> espoused by dynamic languages, of which arguably a good part would be
> automated by a static type system, seems to work against that argument.
>
>
> Andrei
>

Dicebot, Nick, Andrei: my thoughts exactly. And I get a lot of that, 
since my main development language (career-wise) is Java, which dynamic 
language proponents like to bash for it's verbosity (yes, it's more 
verbose that it needs to be, but still way better than a dynamic 
language having to write all those tests!)

I sometimes tried to convince dynamic language proponents - the ones 
that write unittests at least - of the benefits of static typing, by 
stating that static typing is really just "compile time unit-tests"! (it 
is actually)

It didn't work, they didn't get it...

-- 
Bruno Medeiros
https://twitter.com/brunodomedeiros