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There seems to be an unstated assumption that dynamic types cause slower code, but aid productivity. But I find static types greatly help me reason about a prog
by DarkKomunalec 9y ago
There seems to be an unstated assumption that dynamic types cause slower code, but aid productivity. But I find static types greatly help me reason about a program, and when doing python, I resort to extensive documentation of function arguments and return values, as a poor substitute for static types.
- DannyB2 9y agoI am a strong believer in static typing. But I enjoy dynamic types in, for example, Lisp for solving certain problems. When working on a large codebase maintained over years and years, I appreciate static types -- especially when it comes to using refactoring tools, like in Eclipse or similar IDEs.
- wutbrodo 9y agoYea seriously. I'm kind of surprised to see this here: outside of places that are absolutely performance-critical, my complaint and most of the complaints about Python that I hear from people who know what they're talking about is that doing a medium to large project in it is a lot more difficult from the perspective of code readability. This gets multiplied by a million if you're working with engineers who aren't super great, or who are overall great but have a couple bad habits. I'm currently in a Python codebase with ~4 engineers on it, and even with this relatively small team Python is permissive enough to let them do some pretty horrifying things. Dealing with these choices usually cost us far more eng time than the two minutes spent to design something well would have cost them. I like the language overall, in part because it allows mediocre engineers to become quickly productive and you can't always hire 100% excellent engineers. But this main downside is in fact a downside.