3 ms·

What prompted you to want static typing? What did it help you do better?

• prog 16y ago
  That particular project (simulation) required a lot of bit twiddling and working with data of various sizes 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit. So having the specific types nailed at compile time helped. Lack of unsigned data on the JVM was a pain though. Two other reasons I picked scala for that particular project was OO support and mutability. The problem fit OO better and performance was very important (I was anyway taking a bit of a hit choosing JVM over C), so with scala I had the option of for e.g. setting up a C like while loop with a counter rather than mapping a function. This was maybe 6-8 months back. Since then clojure has added neat concepts like transients[1] which allowing mutability in a controlled manner within a function. So thats worth a look. I just preferred to go for a multi-paradigm language rather than a semi-pure functional language as I wasn't sure how the project needs would evolve. What I would have really liked to do was use Python. I actually created an early prototype but the performance didn't meet the needs. I look forward to unladen-swallow :) Python did have some neat libs like struct[2] that would have worked. IMO the choice of static or dynamic should be decided by the problem at hand. I feel dynamic tends to work for majority of projects so thats what I usually prefer but sometimes static works best. [1] http://clojure.org/transients http://clojure.org/transients [2] http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/struct.html#module-struct http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/struct.html#module-struc...