3 ms·

Does "strong typing" now just mean "static typing"? Afaik both lua and python are already strongly typed. Javascript is not and I have no clue about ruby.

• lelanthran 2y ago
  > Does "strong typing" now just mean "static typing"? The distinction strong and weak typing is irrelevant in practice. Weak (but present) static typing beats strong dynamic typing every single time, because what is valuable is NOT "Do I see a type mismatch error only when a user accesses it?", it's "does this mismatch prevent a deployment?" IOW, the only distinction in production is dynamic typing vs static typing, not strong typing vs weak typing.
  • throwaway19972 2y ago
    > because what is valuable is NOT "Do I see a type mismatch error only when a user accesses it?", it's "does this mismatch prevent a deployment?" I argue that understanding the semantics clearly and unambiguously is the most relevant thing, and strong typing tends to do that better (imho—with my only other examples being javascript and the "stringly-typed" perl and some random irrelevant BASIC dialects). > Weak (but present) static typing beats strong dynamic typing every single time, Can you give me an example? I don't think I've ever heard of such a thing. The closest I can think to this is maybe, arguably, the use of `void*` pointers in C which is difficult to see as anything other than pragmatism rather than some deeply beneficial way to write code—even explicit casts produce much more readable code. Another argument I could see is for operator overloading, which (IMO) produces much less readable code, or the implicit conversions feature of Scala (which also, IMO, produces less readable code, but they've addressed a lot of the major problems with it).
  • syrrim 2y ago
    recommend setting up tests for your code s/t failures block deployment. can catch categories of bugs beyond typing errors