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If you use type checking, the breakage occurs when you introduce the change: the author of the change is the one who can figure out what it means if 'foo' is no longer being passed into this function.

If you're duck typing, you find this out in the best case when your unit tests exercise it, and in the worst case by a support call when that 1/1000 error handling path finally gets exercised in production.






I agree with that, in the context of dynamically typed languages.

Slowly but surely, new languages are starting to develop with static duck typing. Implicit interfaces if you will.


Which languages are developing? This is something I’ve been wishing for.

Exactly… with strong typing, you can do the refactor automatically, because the IDE knows everywhere that symbol is used. (For codebases in your control—for third party users, you can indicate that something has been deprecated or renamed via a warning or other language feature)



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