3 ms·

I work for a fortune 20 company and my last employer was a fortune 10 company. My experience is the opposite of yours. I've never seen these consistent wins yo

by jshen 14y ago

I work for a fortune 20 company and my last employer was a fortune 10 company. My experience is the opposite of yours. I've never seen these consistent wins you talk about, despite my years at some of the largest corporations.

tmarthal 14y ago
I don't think the size (or the revenue) of the company matters as much as the size of the projects that you're working on within those companies. Someone mentioned maintenance, so I will also ask how old the codebases that you're working on are? For dynamic typed languages, as the code grows older (with more bug fixes and add-ons and one-offs) then it gets harder and harder to maintain as 100% error free (let alone debug). I will also throw in the fact that doing software library version upgrades on dynamically typed systems is a pain in the ass. Some code branches have system level calls changed, and unless you have very good unit test coverages (which may or may not need to be re-written on a library version upgrade) then you may or may not catch the problem during the upgrade. With a statically typed language, a static analysis tool can tell you exactly where and how the library or interface upgrade affects your codebase.
- jshen 14y ago
  Large projects, at least 4 years old. "I will also throw in the fact that doing software library version upgrades on dynamically typed systems is a pain in the ass." This is very true, but you gain a lot with dynamic languages in other areas. The last company I worked for had about 300 programmers in the office I was in. Roughly half did Java and the other half did Ruby. I was one of the few that moved between both ruby and java projects. I did not see these great benefits of static typing that people always insist exist for large teams at large companies.
ozataman 14y ago
Have you also used dynamic languages extensively as part of large teams at your employer? Dealing with lots of people over long periods of time is messy, no matter what language/tool you use. I think the claim is just that static typing gives you better results than dynamic typing. All relative..
- jshen 14y ago
  Yes, we used ruby with over 100 programmers at the office I was in.

by jshen 14y ago

tmarthal 14y ago

I don't think the size (or the revenue) of the company matters as much as the size of the projects that you're working on within those companies. Someone mentioned maintenance, so I will also ask how old the codebases that you're working on are? For dynamic typed languages, as the code grows older (with more bug fixes and add-ons and one-offs) then it gets harder and harder to maintain as 100% error free (let alone debug). I will also throw in the fact that doing software library version upgrades on dynamically typed systems is a pain in the ass. Some code branches have system level calls changed, and unless you have very good unit test coverages (which may or may not need to be re-written on a library version upgrade) then you may or may not catch the problem during the upgrade. With a statically typed language, a static analysis tool can tell you exactly where and how the library or interface upgrade affects your codebase.

jshen 14y ago
Large projects, at least 4 years old. "I will also throw in the fact that doing software library version upgrades on dynamically typed systems is a pain in the ass." This is very true, but you gain a lot with dynamic languages in other areas. The last company I worked for had about 300 programmers in the office I was in. Roughly half did Java and the other half did Ruby. I was one of the few that moved between both ruby and java projects. I did not see these great benefits of static typing that people always insist exist for large teams at large companies.

ozataman 14y ago

Have you also used dynamic languages extensively as part of large teams at your employer? Dealing with lots of people over long periods of time is messy, no matter what language/tool you use. I think the claim is just that static typing gives you better results than dynamic typing. All relative..

jshen 14y ago
Yes, we used ruby with over 100 programmers at the office I was in.