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Nothing about your suggested solution requires or is exclusive to a statically-typed language. "Replace a send-to-arbitrary-number-of-addresses function with a

Nothing about your suggested solution requires or is exclusive to a statically-typed language. "Replace a send-to-arbitrary-number-of-addresses function with a send-to-exactly-one-address function" is possible in dynamically-typed languages, too, and as you openly admit even a statically-typed language is likely to model email sending in a way that accepts multiple recipient addresses. So your "type system can really help" is really just an irrelevancy you've come up with to try hide your attempt to shove your preferred programming paradigm onto other people. You should probably stop doing that.

Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
i thought of that as well.Went and looked at my mail list programme in Racket, and the mail procedure takes many recipients, but in the form if rest arguments, like: (define (send-mail msg . recipients) ...) passing it a list makes the recipients arg a list with a list of recipients. To actually send to multiple recipients I explicitly have to use the apply procedure that passes all list elements as arguments. as you said, not a staticly typed language. types would have made an eventual error easier to debug though.
codygman 10y ago
> So your "type system can really help" is really just an irrelevancy you've come up with to try hide your attempt to shove your preferred programming paradigm onto other people. Not exactly, but it is a weaker advantage than I thought when writing it. The advantage is that languages like Haskell encourage specializing functions in that manner which avoid that specific bug. However so does test driven development which is just as possible in dynamic languages. The advantage the statically typed language has over even the dynamically typed language plus tdd is that the program won't compile whereas dynamic language plus tdd relies on programmer discipline.

Johnny_Brahms 10y ago

i thought of that as well.Went and looked at my mail list programme in Racket, and the mail procedure takes many recipients, but in the form if rest arguments, like: (define (send-mail msg . recipients) ...) passing it a list makes the recipients arg a list with a list of recipients. To actually send to multiple recipients I explicitly have to use the apply procedure that passes all list elements as arguments. as you said, not a staticly typed language. types would have made an eventual error easier to debug though.

codygman 10y ago

> So your "type system can really help" is really just an irrelevancy you've come up with to try hide your attempt to shove your preferred programming paradigm onto other people. Not exactly, but it is a weaker advantage than I thought when writing it. The advantage is that languages like Haskell encourage specializing functions in that manner which avoid that specific bug. However so does test driven development which is just as possible in dynamic languages. The advantage the statically typed language has over even the dynamically typed language plus tdd is that the program won't compile whereas dynamic language plus tdd relies on programmer discipline.