From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,d89b08801f2aacae X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2002-05-01 19:25:43 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed1.cidera.com!Cidera!cyclone.socal.rr.com!cyclone3.kc.rr.com!news3.kc.rr.com!twister.socal.rr.com.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3CD0A3B8.7B7C8622@san.rr.com> From: Darren New X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.77 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Is strong typing worth the cost? References: <4519e058.0204290722.2189008@posting.google.com> <3CCE8523.6F2E721C@earthlink.net> <3CCEB246.9090009@worldnet.att.net> <3CCFD76A.A60BB9A8@flash.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Thu, 02 May 2002 02:24:33 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 66.75.151.160 X-Complaints-To: abuse@rr.com X-Trace: twister.socal.rr.com 1020306273 66.75.151.160 (Wed, 01 May 2002 19:24:33 PDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 01 May 2002 19:24:33 PDT Organization: RoadRunner - West Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:23386 Date: 2002-05-02T02:24:33+00:00 List-Id: Marin David Condic wrote: > I'm pretty well convinced that you can't really conduct an experiment to > demonstrate the superiority/inferiority of strong typing by using two > different languages. I don't think you can have a single language that has both strong typing and not strong typing. Getting rid of the strong typing in a language allows you to replace that part of the design and coding with other techniques. > In general, we convince ourselves that for larger systems, failure to do any > up front design costs a lot at the back end in terms of missed requirements, > debugging, rework, total failure, etc. Except there's also a lot of empirical evidence that suggests this is not so, in some fields of software development. Certainly, if you're building software to run the space station, doing a lot of up-front development is important and cost-effective. On the other hand, if you're writing run-once software, it's pretty easy to see that the cleanliness of the design is virtually irrelevant. Consider software to animate a crowd of CGI characters in a movie. As long as the end result looks good, it doesn't matter what the code looks like. It could be the most god-awful mess of spaghetti code and misnamed uncommented variables you can imagine, and it just doesn't matter. As soon as the film is out, you're never going to run the program again. Certainly if the requirement is "make the fur on the monster look realistic", the first place to start is not the type system. > I'm not sure that there is any > "scientific" evidence we can point to, but certainly a lot of experience > that tells us this ought to be "Conventional Wisdom". Yes. Which is why it surprised the people who abandoned such wisdom when they were far more successful than those that came before them using that wisdom. > Most of us with experience doing this will contend > that, yes, it costs something up front but it saves a lot at the back end. I think in some environments, like where the requirements are changing faster than you can code and test, that saving costs on code that you no longer need by the time you've finished implementing it is not a worthwhile expenditure, regardless of how much you save. In that situation, the trick would be to save 100% of the costs. -- Darren New San Diego, CA, USA (PST). Cryptokeys on demand. The 90/10 rule of toothpaste: the last 10% of the tube lasts as long as the first 90%.