D-etractions A real world programmers view on D

[SomeDude]

On Tuesday, 4 September 2012 at 19:18:05 UTC, Jacob Carlborg 
wrote:
> On 2012-09-04 15:59, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>
>> I have on occasion had the benefit of simply adding a member 
>> variable to
>> instances of a class when I needed it without having to burden 
>> the rest
>> of the code with knowing about that variable.  I felt dirty 
>> doing it...
>>
>> But I think you are right -- "fake" static typing does not 
>> come close to
>> actual static typing.  If I could count all the time I've 
>> wasted because
>> I mistyped a member variable name, and it "just worked", 
>> blissfully
>> reading null instead of the variable I've set, it would 
>> probably add up
>> to days.  Thankfully, netbeans 7 is better at telling me that 
>> a variable
>> is previously unset or is never used, but it can't be perfect,
>> especially with this mess I inherited.  The original author 
>> thought
>> "modularity" meant importing large pieces of functions from 
>> other files,
>> which the IDE refuses to correctly interpret.
>>
>> This, of course, all comes from two guys who really like 
>> static typing
>> :)  We *may* have a biased view.
>
> I can tell you this, I've wished many times that I had static 
> typing in Ruby. I've also wished quite many times I had dynamic 
> typing in D. I think optional static typing, like Dart, sounds 
> like a good idea.
>
> I'm currently updating a Rails project to Ruby 1.9 and I really 
> wished I had static typing. Just that fact that it won't load 
> file until it's actually needed is quite annoying. Finding all 
> the corner cases can be quite a lot of work. For example, a 
> partial that is loaded when the rendering is triggered by an 
> Ajax request.
>
>> In any case, it is what it is -- the existing code-base is 
>> huge, and I
>> have no real desire to rewrite all of it :)  The best I can do 
>> is add
>> some typing comments and hobble through it (cursing as I go).  
>> If I had
>> a year of spare time, I could rewrite it all in D!
>>
>> -Steve

The only experience I've had with dynamic typing (in Python), I 
can say I hated it. I prefer to write Java code, which I think 
tells a lot about my love for dynamic typing. I probably wouldn't 
mind writing some Lua code, but not in the large. Unless you are 
working in an environment which changes all the time, so that you 
need to adapt your code very quickly, dynamic languages are a 
waste of time above ~10,000 lines of code in my opinion.