Re: Static languages X dynamic languages (was: Re: discuss Digest, Vol 30, Issue 7)
Antonielly Garcia Rodrigues <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.programming.aspect.general |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Quoting Jim Haungs <[email protected]>: >The argument that dynamic languages are less reliable than static ones >ignores the importance of testing and code coverage. The Java run-time can >throw all sorts of unchecked exceptions that are not discoverable by the >compiler, so there's nothing inherently safe about type-safety. >NullPointerException is a particularly common one. Of course. I do not mean that static languages promise full reliability. Test-driven design is important for Software Engineering in both static and dynamic languages. What I mean is that static languages in general offer greater reliability to developers IF WE CONSIDER ONLY THE LANGUAGE, not the development method, because you have another mechanism for finding errors: the type checking (a kind of static analysis) the compiler does. That mechanism is far from catching all errors, and any professional development team will nowadays apply test-driven design too. But with dynamic languages you may apply test-driven design but does not have many of the benefits of static analysis made possible for static languages. I also apply test-driven design in my programs and strongly recommend it for anyone interested in developing software professionally. And, as I have already said, dynamic languages have an important advantage over static languages: the existence of advanced intercessive reflection capabilities. Just see how interesting Smalltalk environments, such as Squeak Smalltalk, are. Antonielly Garcia Rodrigues __________________________________________________ AOSD Discuss mailing list - [email protected] To unsubscribe go to http://aosd.net Check out the AOSD.net Wiki: http://aosd.net/wiki