Re: Type declarations problematic?

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>]

Maciej Sobczak <no.spam@no.spam.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/10/12.html
>
> "[it] seems to be that itοΏ½s explicit typing, where the programmer is
> asked to declare the type of things, that leads to most of the problems.
>
> [...] itοΏ½s starting to look like type declarations are one of those
> accidental difficulties that good programming languages can eliminate."
>
>
> It is obvious that there is a place for dynamically typed languages, but
> the above statements seem to be a bit too far-fetched. Do they mean that
> "typeless" languages will just suck some of the Java audience (fine for
> me), or is it maybe a more general problem that will drive the evolution
> of programming languages further away from strongly typed systems?
> Do you plan a switch to Ruby? ;-)

I don't know.  But note that the opposite of "programmer is asked to
declare the type of things" is not necessarily dynamic typing.  There's
also type inference, as in SML, OCaml, Haskell, all of which are strong
statically-typed languages where you don't have to declare the types of
all the variables.

- Bob