4 ms·

You're quite right in that this is a design choice rather than a defect. I do, however, have a preference for strongly typed languages (and there are very diff

You're quite right in that this is a design choice rather than a defect. I do, however, have a preference for strongly typed languages (and there are very different flavors thereof, from Python to C++ to SML). I think weak typing is great for getting prototypes out the door in a hurry (or even just for getting up to speed in a language in a hurry), but dynamic typing really helps in the later stages of an application.

tikhonj 15y ago
First, let's be clear on terminology: dynamic is the opposite of static; weak is the opposite of strong; the two are orthogonal. "Weak" and "strong" typing is about coercion; static and dynamic is about compile-time verification. I personally think that if your language is dynamically typed, it should be weakly typed; if your language is statically typed, it should also be strongly typed. So I would (and do) prefer JavaScript/Haskell to Python. I figure if you're going to be dynamically typed, you may as well be as flexible as possible; it also makes sense from a semantic point of view (my whole a 1 is a 1 is a "1" spiel). On the other hand, if you're enforcing types at compile time, having type coercion just seems weird. (Of course, you can have ad hoc polymorphism like Haskell's type classes that could do something similar, but that's different.) I think the practical difference between "weak" and "strong" typing is much smaller than the difference between dynamic and static typing. Finally, I do think the behavior of + is a defect, but not because of coercion. Rather, I don't like how it does two different things. If it only added numbers, it would work perfectly; the other arithmetic operators all work as expected. (Yes, I think the NaN behavior makes sense.)
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