Test vs. Type

Another article in the long, ongoing debate (30 years? 🙂 about static and dynamic typing. Oliver Steele’s Test versus Type is probably the most accessible and believable of the arguments I’ve seen. One variable that he does not account for is that IDEs are able to provide you with more hints and assistance in statically typed languages.

I’ve come around to the point now where I think that static typing is actually not a bad thing. One major difference is that the folks creating dynamically typed languages are actively trying to make the programmer’s job easier. Despite being statically-typed, Java could compete favorably with Python and others if the language itself had some more features that are built in elsewhere.