Xref: utzoo comp.lang.misc:7320 comp.object:3075 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!udel!ee.udel.edu From: new@ee.udel.edu (Darren New) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc,comp.object Subject: Re: Run-time Type Errors in Smalltalk (was Re: blip (was...)) Message-ID: <50087@nigel.ee.udel.edu> Date: 8 Apr 91 19:41:59 GMT References: <887@puck.mrcu> Sender: usenet@ee.udel.edu Followup-To: comp.lang.misc Organization: University of Delaware Lines: 23 Nntp-Posting-Host: snow-white.ee.udel.edu In article olson@lear.juliet.ll.mit.edu ( Steve Olson) writes: >People who get endlessly alarmed about the alleged lack of type saftey in >a dynamically-typed languge are not well-informed about how Lisp or Smalltalk >software development actually works. Here, Here! I'll second that. And people who say "Well, you could do it just as well in a statically typed language if you had as big a runtime system" I'll answer by saying "why do *most* dynamic languages have huge libraries and great debuggers and *most* static languages have lousy libraries and lousy debuggers?" I suspect that because the static code is so much less reusable that the incentive is to never change the late-60's model of programming lest we break all that software. People rave about GDB, but it looks worse to me than Delta on a 1968 release of CP-V. Then look at the Smalltalk debugger, which is not very big because it resuses most of the code from the editor, browser, and compiler, and it blows any other debugger out of the water. -- Darren -- --- Darren New --- Grad Student --- CIS --- Univ. of Delaware --- ----- Network Protocols, Graphics, Programming Languages, FDTs ----- +=+=+ My time is very valuable, but unfortunately only to me +=+=+ + When you drive screws with a hammer, screwdrivers are unrecognisable +