Re: Is strong typing worth the cost?

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

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. There is so much more to language design than just its
type model, so you can't really isolate just that one feature. The *best*
you could hope to do is demonstrate that Language A that has amongst it
weaponry strong typing, encapsulation, human readable syntax, ... (fear,
surprise, ruthless efficiency...:-) in general results in higher
productivity & quality than Language B that has weak typing, cryptic syntax,
little to no compile or runtime checking, etc. Even that would be extremely
hard to construct an experiment to demonstrate, but at least you can get it
down to one (rather large) variable. That might lead one to guess that
"strong typing" is one of the contributing factors to higher success, but it
really isn't the same as being able to demonstrate that hypothesis with any
scientific certainty.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"Gary Scott" <scottg@flash.net> wrote in message
news:3CCFD76A.A60BB9A8@flash.net...
>
> Even with the resources, you likely won't have equal knowledge in
> multiple languages in order to do the best possible job in each
> language.  In a great many fields, execution performance is highly
> important whereas not in others, so you also need to carefully choose
> the problem you're solving in those multiple languages, possibly
> designed specifically targeting specific, disparate problem domains.
> Some languages claim to be "general purpose", but usually those are weak
> in numerical programming.  Those tailored for numerical programming are
> often weak in "system" programming.  So no matter what you do, it
> probably won't be a fair comparison.
>