[Haskell-cafe] Dynamic typing makes you more productive?

[Don Stewart]

jgbailey:
> >From a recent interview[1] with the guy leading Ruby development on
> .NET at Microsoft:
> 
>  "You spend less time writing software than you spend maintaining
> software. Optimizing for writing software versus maintaining software
> is probably the wrong thing to do. Static typing makes it harder to
> maintain software because it's harder to change it."
> 
> Two years ago I would have agreed with that statement. Now - no way.
> Make the compiler work for you. I've done a lot of Ruby development
> and I would never use it for a project of more than 3 or 4 people.
> It's an awesome language but I don't think it would scale to
> programming "in the large." Any object can be modified at any time.
> Determining where a particular method comes from can be an exercise in
> Sherlockian deduction. Give an organization of 100 developers that
> much freedom and I can only imagine chaos would result.
> 
> Justin

Agreed, maintainability is all about restricting the damage people
can do, and making refactoring safer :)

The kind of havoc a new programmer can create in a pure, strongly typed,
polymorphic chunk of code is tiny compared to an "anything goes"
language scenario.

-- Don