> No, I disagree. Perl gains a lot of its expressive power from being lax
> about typing. I suspect it will also impose an unacceptable overhed for
> the vast majority who don't want it - at the very least every variable
> access will have to check an 'are you typed' flag.
I agree that weak typing is a huge advantage for Perl -- if the task is
small. However, for a large project with more than 2 engineers, strong
typing can save weeks of integration effort. In a typical large project,
the first step is to define APIs, then split off and begin coding against
those APIs. The problem with using Perl for a project of this size is that
when it's time to integrate, there's no compile-time way to check that the
inputs and outputs of the APIs are correctly typed. This is a very small
piece in a complex puzzle, but incredibly useful for this purpose. And I
don't buy the argument that I should use a different language just because
it's a large task.
I'm sure that, given the talent working on perl, an implementation could be
found which would not slow down users who aren't interested in strong typing
and would not force strong typing on anyone. I just don't think it should
be thrown out because you personally wouldn't use it.
++t
