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An experiment about static and dynamic type systems

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Armando:
Moderately interesting study. Still worth sharing.
This blog article has good comments at the bottom. [Disclaimer : I haven't read the actual study]

f0dder:
Haven't had the time to look at this in detail, but the following caught my attention:
One issue is that experimenter, to reduce variables such as familiarity or different IDEs, developed his own language, Purity, in two variants.
--- End quote ---
Does that mean everybody were stuck with 'dumb' text editors? In that case, the study is pretty useless... some of the really big advantages statically typed languages offer over dynamic ones is all the assistance you get from your development tools, which is extremely hard to implement for dynamic languages.

If you add some decent type inference into the mix (C#, C++2011, Scala, ...) you gain several of the brevity benefits associated with dynamic languages, without the clusterfsck messup potential.

Armando:
There seems to be a few methodological weirdnesses in this study, which wouldn't surprising as it's often the case with... studies.

However, there might something to explore there : "dynamic languages" for very small projects, statically typed ones for bigger ones. Makes sense... Maybe

Renegade:
...some of the really big advantages statically typed languages offer over dynamic ones is all the assistance you get from your development tools, which is extremely hard to implement for dynamic languages.
-f0dder (September 12, 2011, 07:00 PM)
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+1

C# allows dynamic typing, but I'll be damned if I'll use it if I can at all avoid it. (dynamic and var)

It has its place, but those situations are kind of specific.


I would also be interested to know about how they compare in large scale projects.

f0dder:
C# allows dynamic typing, but I'll be damned if I'll use it if I can at all avoid it. (dynamic and var)-Renegade (September 12, 2011, 11:21 PM)
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'var' is not dynamic typing, it's used for static type inference which is super useful for DRY reasons.

'dynamic' is something to be very careful about - it tends to ripple out if you start using it.

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