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And then you need to write some serialization code or IPC and static type system is a pain or just makes it plain impossible to do (in which case this is a shor

And then you need to write some serialization code or IPC and static type system is a pain or just makes it plain impossible to do (in which case this is a shortcoming of this particular type system, not the idea itself, but still). No, I don't want to argue and I'm not religiously in favor of either unityped or typed languages. I have no problem in admitting that there are things that are made easier with static typing. I'm having good time writing both in OCaml and Erlang. On the other hand it worries me that proponents of static typing have difficulty admitting that even most sophisticated type systems are not suited for certain other tasks.

jroesch 14y ago
To me it seems that the point on serialization is completely moot in languages like Haskell(what we are talking about), serialization may be hard(er) to do in a language like Java or C++ where we have a rooted type hierarchy and we can't easily add new functionality, or do type based dispatch. Haskell's type classes allow us the freedom to define new kinds of functionality on top of existing types easily. You can look at libraries like Aeson, which allows serialization and deserialization from JSON with just a few lines of code. The biggest problem is that people's view is strapped to this old dynamic Lisp vs. C kind of paradigm that doesn't exist in modern functional languages.