Paul Rubin wrote: > Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> writes: >> Since the "language wars" of the 1990s, dynamic languages have won. > > Are you kidding? Nothing has won, the wars are still going on, and > dynamic and static typing both have their winning use cases and will be > around forever.
No, I stand by my statement, on the basis that Bob Martin said it and he's smarter than me and he actually was a participant so he knows what he's talking about *wink* In one sense, "language wars" still go on. Conflict never really ends, it just shifts from place to place, and there will always be "brush wars", like Pascal versus PL/P, Pascal versus C, C versus Java, Perl versus Python, Python versus Ruby, etc. But the 1990s idea was that there ought to be One Language To Rule Them All, that there should be a single language which is the optimal language for every programming task. The 90s brought that to a head, with Smalltalk, Java, C, and Lisp all contenders. Today the nature of the wars has tended to change. Naturally there are still clueless n00bs who insist that there must be One True Language for everything but the wars today are more about the full technology stack (e.g. C#/.NET/IIS/Windows versus Java/J2EE/Apache/Solaris) rather than specifically about the language. So in the sense that people still argue about languages, you are correct that "language wars" continue, but Martin's specific claim was that dynamic languages *as a group* won the war in the sense that all popular static languages now include dynamic features, while dynamic languages don't include static features: Popular dynamic languages include: - Python - PHP - Javascript None of them can really be characterised as having "static" features in any meaningful sense. (The introduction of type-hints to Python won't change that, any more than documenting the types in a docstring has changed it.) Popular static languages include: - Java has reflection and runtime generics - C# has the "dynamic" keyword which is based on .Net's reflection - C++ has dynamic dispatch and virtual functions Go is an interesting (counter-?) example: it is a static language almost entirely lacking in dynamic features. From the Go FAQs: "The only way to have dynamically dispatched methods is through an interface. Methods on a struct or any other concrete type are always resolved statically." http://golang.org/doc/faq#How_do_I_get_dynamic_dispatch_of_methods (Go may have other dynamic features, but I am unaware of them.) But Go is lacking many other features (exceptions, generics, variant types, even basic numeric coercions. Go is either going to revolutionise programming or it will end up just another niche language. I suspect the latter. The point is, despite maverick languages like Go, mainstream static languages have developed dynamic features, while dynamic languages have not reduced their dynamicism to become more static. Instead, dynamic languages are developing Just In Time compilers to use *runtime* type information for efficiency (e.g. Mercury, PHP, Python, Javascript all do this). -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
