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

[Philip Armstrong]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 09:41:15AM -0700, Justin Bailey wrote:
>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.

It looks from the outside like Ruby is going through some growing
pains as a result of the excerise of "too much freedom" at the
moment. But I wouldn't write Ruby off on account of that: an
interesting article I read recently made the comparision with Emacs
lisp which offers a similar level of power to the programmer, in that
pretty much any function can be redefined at any point, and yet it has
a thriving culture of Emacs extensions, all written by disparate
people who manage not to step on each other's toes.

IOW, it's a cultural issue as well as a language issue. Ruby
programmers will no doubt develop their own culture of what is and
isn't "allowed" in publically available extensions just as Emacs lisp
programmers have.

Phil

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