On Tuesday, October 8, 2013 6:26:20 AM UTC-4, Paul Butcher wrote:
>
> The best explanation of these misunderstandings I've come across is "What 
> to Know Before Debating Type Systems":
>
> http://cdsmith.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/an-old-article-i-wrote/
>
> In particular it asserts (correctly in my view) that what static type 
> system proponents mean by "type" and what dynamic type system proponents 
> mean by "type" are very different things. Most debates founder on a failure 
> to recognise that difference.
>
> --
> paul.butcher->msgCount++
>

Thanks for that link, it's a pretty good article.

No amount of proof is going to make your software ironclad.  You could 
start the program, but the operating system only has half as much memory 
available as it requires.   Your network connection could be down.  The 
database could be off, or someone could have changed the user account 
password.   The configuration file could be corrupted.  The SQL statement 
in your code (or properties file, or whatever) could have a spelling 
error.  You could have a dependency on a library with an undiscovered bug.  

We take for granted that outside of our programs' specific internals, the 
rest of the world can go insane, break our software completely, and there's 
nothing we can do but try to detect the error early and fail gracefully.   
I like the Scala language, but even if you push its static type system to 
its limits, it's like building a house with invincible walls on one side - 
you better hope the tornado winds all blow from that direction, because 
otherwise you're in just as much trouble as the people living in a 
lean-to.  

But back to practicality - Ebay was originally written in Perl.  Myspace 
was written in ColdFusion.  Facebook was written mostly in PHP.  Youtube 
was written in Python.  Twitter was writtin in Ruby.  Most of the tools 
around KVM virtualization in the Linux kernel are written in Python.  
Slashdot was written in Perl.   Of course most or all of these sites had to 
do extra work once they were dealing with a massive volume of traffic, but 
how many of us have that problem?  When I'm making a million dollars a 
month and programming language X has some fundamental aspect that prevents 
better scaling, I'll look into languages with better performance.   But I 
see the state of the modern web as proof enough that non-static type 
systems work just fine for an overwhelming number of use cases.

-Mike

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