4 ms·

From my personal experience, the saving in development time is very much real. I used to work on .NET, and you'd have to program against crazy, non-intuitive p

From my personal experience, the saving in development time is very much real. I used to work on .NET, and you'd have to program against crazy, non-intuitive patterns in order to have your code "clean" (I hated IoC containers as well as writing all that boilerplate code for Attributes. And for Java, remember that hilarious post about Factory-Factory-Factory patterns http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431? http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431?) I'm not saying statically typed languages are bad. Type errors always bite me the ass in Ruby, but it's a small price to pay (IMO) for better maintainability. EDIT: By the way, it sounds like I'm an ignorant dynamically-typed lover. I'm not, I still yearn for those type safety net, but I'm just speaking from a pragmatic perspective.

cageface 14y ago
The kinds of static type systems you find in C# & Java are too primitive. Something like Haskell with perhaps a little less religion about mutability is a whole different story.
- michaels0620 14y ago
  Does Scala fit your idea of something in between? It has nice type inference features and does not require pure immutability.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - cageface 14y ago
    Personally I like Scala but I think it's too complex and a little too clever to escape the FP niche. I'd be happy to be wrong about this.
    - soc88 14y ago
      Interesting. I never perceived Scala to be in a functional niche. As far as I know most people consider it to be an object-oriented language first and foremost, with functional features. Removing inheritance would have made the language (and every other language, too) a lot easier, but seeing that people cope with C# or Java quite well I'm not sure about the merit of the "complex" claim. Comparing the C# and the Scala spec is very enlightening, even though they have different writing styles of course (so I won't bother bringing up page numbers). Checking and realizing which "features" are in one language, but not in the other, is very helpful to gain some insight into this topic. What do you think?
      - cageface 14y ago
        I don't think page counts of specs or feature lists really tell you that much. I didn't find it that hard too get up to speed in Scala but it seems to scare away too many Java people. My main criticism is that it allows too much syntactic flexibility.
        soc88 14y ago
        Yes, I'm full aware of that. I'm not claiming that it tells us the complete and final truth, just that it is an interesting data point. In my experience a lot of those "I programmed 15 years in Java, get off my lawn" senior developers get angry about Scala. This is interesting, because it isn't that way for other languages running on the JVM like Clojure, JRuby or Groovy. It is only a speculation why it is like that, but in my opinion it is because alternatives like Groovy, JRuby, Clojure are considered to be some sort of "supplemental" or "add-on" languages by those people, while Scala is seen as full-scale alternative to Java (not in the sense that it will replace Java, but in the sense of "I can write 100% of my application in this language without dropping down to Java for the performance critical parts"). I think it is interesting how different the reaction is compared to C# <> F#, for instance. Is it because Java and C# developers come from different backgrounds? Because F# is "made by Microsoft", while Scala is not "made by Oracle"? Is it because Java developers were happy with Sun telling them that they wouldn't need all those "fancy" features of the .NET languages? I think this would be interesting to discuss further, although I think it is hard to come up with valid data points. From my experience, most of the claims about "complexity" and "too hard for beginners" come not from people learning the language, but from people with > 5 years of Java experience _not_ wanting to learn another language. I'm quite ambivalent about the syntactic flexibility. On the one hand, they cut it down for 2.10, but on the other I think it is a superficial measurement. There are a lot of languages with more flexibility and a lot of languages with less, both seem to be alive and well. (Just want to make it clear that I think your stance is totally valid, even if I disagree slightly. Different people have different tastes, and this is a good thing!)
  - thebluesky 14y ago
    I've found Scala to combine the best of both worlds, non-verbose and statically typed.
- ansible 14y ago
  > Something like Haskell with perhaps a little less religion about mutability is a whole different story. I consider Ocaml [1] to fill that particular niche. When I was going through my FP phase, I tried that out a little before going full-on lazy evaluation with Haskell. From what I can recall, the type inference isn't as cool as what's in Haskell, but at least it's there. There are plenty of libraries, and packages for major OSs. [1] http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml/ http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml/
  - gnuvince 14y ago
    What do you mean by "the type inference isn't as cool as what's in Haskell"?
    - ansible 14y ago
      IIRC, Ocaml does use Hindley-Miller, but Haskell has some tweaks that make it work better. I may be mistaken, someone who is more current on both please correct me. In retrospect, I think I was also thinking about type-classes in Haskell, which Ocaml does not have. But from what I understand Ocaml has other means to achieve the same ends.
Dn_Ab 14y ago
Using Java and C# as an example of typed languages is like using Youtube comments as a representation of humanity. Once you get a hang of them, writing in any modern statically typed declarative language enters you into a state such that code flows out effortlessly. It is a wonderful feeling.
pragmatic 14y ago
I can't speak for/to java but C# has come along way. I used to feel just like you did (at the asp.net 1.x) days. I went to Ruby on Rails for awhile. But once NET 2.0 (generics/nullable types) and then 3.5 (LINQ), I was hooked on C# again. We also have the dynamic type now. I want the features a statically typed language gives me with minimal boilerplate. It's hard to give up IDE features like "find everyplace this method is called" and know that you found all of them (disregarding reflection, etc and assuming private methods). Visual Studio will do this type of thing for Python now. We aren't terribly far away from having the benefits of both. I really like python as a scripting language. I just don't feel as good about scripting languages in big projects as I do a modern language like C#. (Just my humble opinion, no science).
- davesims 14y ago
  I like C# these days quite a bit, after ~10 years in both Java and C#, and now ~7 in Ruby, my language preference is Ruby first, then C#. I do a lot of Android development these days too, so I retain a strong connection to Java. But when I have to move from Rails to, say, ASP MVC (which is quite good, btw), generics are actually one of my biggest frustrations. Even with some of the quasi-dynamic typing available in C#, and even though I believe I have a pretty strong grasp of advanced generics concepts (in? out? Generic methods? Wildcards? Argh!) to me they introduce a maddening level of conceptual complexity and un-readability that are simply not worth the trouble.
  - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    This is not complexity born of strict typing, this is complexity born of object oriented programming. This is what we do in OOP. We take a complex problem and attempt to map it to an even more complex hierarchy of objects and interfaces.
papsosouid 14y ago
>From my personal experience, the saving in development time is very much real. But your personal experience is comparing expressive languages to unexpressive languages, and then making the mistake of thinking you are comparing dynamically typed languages to statically typed languages. What does .net's ugly (in your opinion) API have to do with static typing? Factory-Factory-Factory patterns is a joke even in java, but it also has nothing to do with static typing at all. >By the way, it sounds like I'm an ignorant dynamically-typed lover. I'm not Well, you are repeating the most commonly used and easily debunked strawman, so it really does sound like ignorance. Have you used a modern statically typed language? If not, by definition you are in fact ignorant.
- johnkchow 14y ago
  Got to say this is hard to admit, but after reading everyone else's comments, I am indeed ignorant. Thanks for the reality check.
  - papsosouid 14y ago
    There shouldn't be a stigma about ignorance like there is. Everyone is ignorant of lots of stuff, nobody knows everything. Knowing that you don't know something is good, not something to be ashamed of. If you are aware of what you don't know, then you can learn it.
bad_user 14y ago
I hated IoC containers as well as writing all that boilerplate code for Attributes C# and Java are only representative for static languages because they are mainstream. My static language of choice is currently Scala. It is less verbose than both C# and Java (for example you never have to generate setters/getters). Also, whenever I work with Java I always work with projects such as Lombok / Guava. And I have no need for "IoC containers". This is partly because of Scala, but also because of the libraries I'm using. Currently I'm using DropWizard for the development of web services, which is just a thin wrapper around Jetty + JAX-RS. Because the resources (commonly known as controllers in MVC frameworks) are configured as instances (not classes specified in web.xml), then IoC is easy because you are free to do the bindings yourself. IMHO, the necessity for IoC containers in C# / Java has risen from poorly designed frameworks. So you may not have a choice in the matter, however using something like Google Guice in combination with Scala is much nicer, because of Scala's mixins in combination with structural typing.
specialist 14y ago
Java, XML/XSL/XSD, and design patterns (gone wild) all hit about the same time. Most (but not all) of my pain slinging Java come from misuse of XML and design patterns. Now we're on to services (SOA). Yippee. It's just a socket, marshaling, retry logic. Does it really need its own ecosystem of consultants, conferences, and books? Java the language could be more terse with type inference, string literals, default visibility modifiers, and some other syntactic sugar. (I'm pretty optimistic about Ceylon as a successor.) But 18 years on, for the most part, I'm still very pleased with Java. Except autoboxing and annotations; garbage. Java the platform (JDK, J2EE, java.util., collections, javax., misc APIs) should be burned to the ground, plowed under, and complete do over. And any one who says "factory method" gets keelhauled.

cageface 14y ago

The kinds of static type systems you find in C# & Java are too primitive. Something like Haskell with perhaps a little less religion about mutability is a whole different story.

michaels0620 14y ago
Does Scala fit your idea of something in between? It has nice type inference features and does not require pure immutability.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- cageface 14y ago
  Personally I like Scala but I think it's too complex and a little too clever to escape the FP niche. I'd be happy to be wrong about this.
  - soc88 14y ago
    Interesting. I never perceived Scala to be in a functional niche. As far as I know most people consider it to be an object-oriented language first and foremost, with functional features. Removing inheritance would have made the language (and every other language, too) a lot easier, but seeing that people cope with C# or Java quite well I'm not sure about the merit of the "complex" claim. Comparing the C# and the Scala spec is very enlightening, even though they have different writing styles of course (so I won't bother bringing up page numbers). Checking and realizing which "features" are in one language, but not in the other, is very helpful to gain some insight into this topic. What do you think?
    - cageface 14y ago
      I don't think page counts of specs or feature lists really tell you that much. I didn't find it that hard too get up to speed in Scala but it seems to scare away too many Java people. My main criticism is that it allows too much syntactic flexibility.
      - soc88 14y ago
        Yes, I'm full aware of that. I'm not claiming that it tells us the complete and final truth, just that it is an interesting data point. In my experience a lot of those "I programmed 15 years in Java, get off my lawn" senior developers get angry about Scala. This is interesting, because it isn't that way for other languages running on the JVM like Clojure, JRuby or Groovy. It is only a speculation why it is like that, but in my opinion it is because alternatives like Groovy, JRuby, Clojure are considered to be some sort of "supplemental" or "add-on" languages by those people, while Scala is seen as full-scale alternative to Java (not in the sense that it will replace Java, but in the sense of "I can write 100% of my application in this language without dropping down to Java for the performance critical parts"). I think it is interesting how different the reaction is compared to C# <> F#, for instance. Is it because Java and C# developers come from different backgrounds? Because F# is "made by Microsoft", while Scala is not "made by Oracle"? Is it because Java developers were happy with Sun telling them that they wouldn't need all those "fancy" features of the .NET languages? I think this would be interesting to discuss further, although I think it is hard to come up with valid data points. From my experience, most of the claims about "complexity" and "too hard for beginners" come not from people learning the language, but from people with > 5 years of Java experience _not_ wanting to learn another language. I'm quite ambivalent about the syntactic flexibility. On the one hand, they cut it down for 2.10, but on the other I think it is a superficial measurement. There are a lot of languages with more flexibility and a lot of languages with less, both seem to be alive and well. (Just want to make it clear that I think your stance is totally valid, even if I disagree slightly. Different people have different tastes, and this is a good thing!)
- thebluesky 14y ago
  I've found Scala to combine the best of both worlds, non-verbose and statically typed.
ansible 14y ago
> Something like Haskell with perhaps a little less religion about mutability is a whole different story. I consider Ocaml [1] to fill that particular niche. When I was going through my FP phase, I tried that out a little before going full-on lazy evaluation with Haskell. From what I can recall, the type inference isn't as cool as what's in Haskell, but at least it's there. There are plenty of libraries, and packages for major OSs. [1] http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml/ http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml/
- gnuvince 14y ago
  What do you mean by "the type inference isn't as cool as what's in Haskell"?
  - ansible 14y ago
    IIRC, Ocaml does use Hindley-Miller, but Haskell has some tweaks that make it work better. I may be mistaken, someone who is more current on both please correct me. In retrospect, I think I was also thinking about type-classes in Haskell, which Ocaml does not have. But from what I understand Ocaml has other means to achieve the same ends.

Dn_Ab 14y ago

Using Java and C# as an example of typed languages is like using Youtube comments as a representation of humanity. Once you get a hang of them, writing in any modern statically typed declarative language enters you into a state such that code flows out effortlessly. It is a wonderful feeling.

pragmatic 14y ago

I can't speak for/to java but C# has come along way. I used to feel just like you did (at the asp.net 1.x) days. I went to Ruby on Rails for awhile. But once NET 2.0 (generics/nullable types) and then 3.5 (LINQ), I was hooked on C# again. We also have the dynamic type now. I want the features a statically typed language gives me with minimal boilerplate. It's hard to give up IDE features like "find everyplace this method is called" and know that you found all of them (disregarding reflection, etc and assuming private methods). Visual Studio will do this type of thing for Python now. We aren't terribly far away from having the benefits of both. I really like python as a scripting language. I just don't feel as good about scripting languages in big projects as I do a modern language like C#. (Just my humble opinion, no science).

davesims 14y ago
I like C# these days quite a bit, after ~10 years in both Java and C#, and now ~7 in Ruby, my language preference is Ruby first, then C#. I do a lot of Android development these days too, so I retain a strong connection to Java. But when I have to move from Rails to, say, ASP MVC (which is quite good, btw), generics are actually one of my biggest frustrations. Even with some of the quasi-dynamic typing available in C#, and even though I believe I have a pretty strong grasp of advanced generics concepts (in? out? Generic methods? Wildcards? Argh!) to me they introduce a maddening level of conceptual complexity and un-readability that are simply not worth the trouble.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  This is not complexity born of strict typing, this is complexity born of object oriented programming. This is what we do in OOP. We take a complex problem and attempt to map it to an even more complex hierarchy of objects and interfaces.

papsosouid 14y ago

>From my personal experience, the saving in development time is very much real. But your personal experience is comparing expressive languages to unexpressive languages, and then making the mistake of thinking you are comparing dynamically typed languages to statically typed languages. What does .net's ugly (in your opinion) API have to do with static typing? Factory-Factory-Factory patterns is a joke even in java, but it also has nothing to do with static typing at all. >By the way, it sounds like I'm an ignorant dynamically-typed lover. I'm not Well, you are repeating the most commonly used and easily debunked strawman, so it really does sound like ignorance. Have you used a modern statically typed language? If not, by definition you are in fact ignorant.

johnkchow 14y ago
Got to say this is hard to admit, but after reading everyone else's comments, I am indeed ignorant. Thanks for the reality check.
- papsosouid 14y ago
  There shouldn't be a stigma about ignorance like there is. Everyone is ignorant of lots of stuff, nobody knows everything. Knowing that you don't know something is good, not something to be ashamed of. If you are aware of what you don't know, then you can learn it.

bad_user 14y ago

I hated IoC containers as well as writing all that boilerplate code for Attributes C# and Java are only representative for static languages because they are mainstream. My static language of choice is currently Scala. It is less verbose than both C# and Java (for example you never have to generate setters/getters). Also, whenever I work with Java I always work with projects such as Lombok / Guava. And I have no need for "IoC containers". This is partly because of Scala, but also because of the libraries I'm using. Currently I'm using DropWizard for the development of web services, which is just a thin wrapper around Jetty + JAX-RS. Because the resources (commonly known as controllers in MVC frameworks) are configured as instances (not classes specified in web.xml), then IoC is easy because you are free to do the bindings yourself. IMHO, the necessity for IoC containers in C# / Java has risen from poorly designed frameworks. So you may not have a choice in the matter, however using something like Google Guice in combination with Scala is much nicer, because of Scala's mixins in combination with structural typing.

specialist 14y ago

Java, XML/XSL/XSD, and design patterns (gone wild) all hit about the same time. Most (but not all) of my pain slinging Java come from misuse of XML and design patterns. Now we're on to services (SOA). Yippee. It's just a socket, marshaling, retry logic. Does it really need its own ecosystem of consultants, conferences, and books? Java the language could be more terse with type inference, string literals, default visibility modifiers, and some other syntactic sugar. (I'm pretty optimistic about Ceylon as a successor.) But 18 years on, for the most part, I'm still very pleased with Java. Except autoboxing and annotations; garbage. Java the platform (JDK, J2EE, java.util., collections, javax., misc APIs) should be burned to the ground, plowed under, and complete do over. And any one who says "factory method" gets keelhauled.