Re: Why I don't believe in static typing

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Erann Gat) writes:

> Neither static nor dynamic typing would have helped in this situation. 
> But I do believe that a dynamic typing *mindset* would have been more
> likely to produce a correct solution because it encourages you to think
> more about possible run-time errors.

Well, I quite liked your story, and in my experience the
sort of error you relate is absolutely typical.

What I also find interesting about this episode is, at
the meta level, that you got the responses I expected
right away:
 * the programmers were incompetent (shoot the messenger)
 * That's not a typing issue, it's a concurrency issue (head in the sand).
 * refusal to learn from the experience (from your managers/team).

I would almost go so far as to say that KNOWING you're going
to get errors at runtime is BETTER, because it leads to safer/more
robust designs.  Your programmer _knows_ he might have missed a
call path, and will think about where/how to handle those missed
errors, even if it's just to log the bug and continue in some sane
state.

An interesting war story.  Thanks.