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Several flavours of Lisp have been used for building very big pieces of software (e.g. Emacs, Orbitz). Same for some Erlang products. I think this depends on th
by nextos 11y ago
Several flavours of Lisp have been used for building very big pieces of software (e.g. Emacs, Orbitz). Same for some Erlang products. I think this depends on the architecture, documentation, etc.
Dynamic typing allows for loose protocols, which is sometimes very advantageous when you don't know exactly the software you are building. PG explains this much better.
Nonetheless, I'd love to see more optional static typing systems on top of Lisp.
- mannykannot 11y agoYou cannot program effectively unless you understand the syntax and semantics of the data representations you are using, and when you do understand those things, perhaps you are unlikely to make type errors in the first place.
- nextos 11y agoI meant the domain of the problem, so I was saying dynamic typing is advantageous for exploratory programming and modeling. Whereas static typing is easier to use if you have pre-planned all your programs.
- mannykannot 11y agoI wasn't intending to disagree with you; my intent was to suggest a possible explanation for why static typing may be less helpful in practice than some people (myself included) would have guessed. To put it another way, programmers have to be aware of their data's types regardless of whether they are using a statically or dynamically typed language. If this is correct, then we can assume that the developers of successful large projects have this ability, regardless of the language used in that project.