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What to know before debating type systems (perl.org)
3 points by kibwen on Oct 5, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment



Posted this because it has an interesting view on static and dynamic type systems that I hadn't considered before.

"Dynamic and static type systems are two completely different things, whose goals happen to partially overlap. [... ] Great confusion results from trying to find a world view in which 'type' really means the same thing in both systems. It doesn't. [ ... ] Many programmers approach the question of whether they prefer static or dynamic types by comparing some languages they know that use both techniques. [ ... ] The problem, in this case, is that most programmers have limited experience, and haven't tried a lot of languages. For context, here, six or seven doesn't count as 'a lot.' On top of that, it requires more than a cursory glance to really see the benefit of these two very different styles of programming. Two interesting consequences of this are: 1) Many programmers have used very poor statically typed languages. 2) Many programmers have used dynamically typed languages very poorly."




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