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Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: RE: Dynamic typing (part 3)
Message-ID: <1991Apr12.015814.28888@comp.vuw.ac.nz>
From: brian@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Brian Boutel)
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 1991 01:58:14 GMT
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In article <11APR91.08052192@uc780.umd.edu>, cs450a03@uc780.umd.edu writes:

|> 
|> My experience is that I can develop a program about 6 times as fast in
|> a dynamically typed language (APL in my case) than I can in a
|> statically typed language (C in my case--I'd be even slower in
|> FORTRAN).  This is anecdotal, but you've chosen to ignore dozens of
|> postings giving reasons why this might be so.  I've seen postings
|> which indicate other dynamically typed languages (Icon, Smalltalk)
|> have similar advantages.
|> 

You might be familiar with Fred Brookes' book "The Mythical Man Month".
In this he says

	Productivity seems constant in terms of elementary statements,...

        Programming productivity may be increased by as much as five 			
times when a suitable high-level language is used

So APL would be expected to lead to greater productivity than C because
APL programs are shorter than C programs. And this is not do do with the
absence of declarations. Anyway, static typing does not imply a
requirement to declare everything.

Besides, my concern is with reliability, safety, not how fast you can
hack something together. Let's talk about the software engineering
aspects of this topic.

|> Incidentally, I'd have to say C takes the cake as having the WORST
|> run-time-error behavior of any language I've seen (besides machine
|> language/assembly language).  Please don't confuse the sort of things
|> C does with its "dynamic types" with the sort of things that happen in
|> a "true" dynamically typed language.
|> 

Did I even mention C?


--brian

-- 
Internet: brian@comp.vuw.ac.nz
Postal: Brian Boutel, Computer Science Dept, Victoria University of Wellington,
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