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The advantage of dynamic languages is not in succinctness; the advantage is being able to defer the concrete definitions of the objects you're dealing with, or
by thinkpad20 12y ago
The advantage of dynamic languages is not in succinctness; the advantage is being able to defer the concrete definitions of the objects you're dealing with, or to ignore them entirely: it's what lets you pass arbitrary objects around in your middleware stack, or do things like ActiveRecord, click.py or sh.py which do crazy things with the object and module system, etc. There are things that are really hard in a statically typed language, or that you simply can't do, that dynamic languages let you do effortlessly. Of course, all of this freedom comes with cost. But gaining succinctness is hardly the major win of dynamic languages.
- mercurial 12y agoWell, succinctness is an advantage, and I'll claim with no data to support me that it is the reason, combined with the lack of compilation, that most developers choose dynamic languages, without necessarily realizing what they are giving up.
- thinkpad20 12y agoAs someone who works for a company that uses python, but mostly uses Haskell in his spare time, my python code is often far more verbose than my Haskell (for a similar degree of complexity). I suppose if your yardstick is Java or something than you'll probably be more concise in a dynamic language, but that's really besides the point. The amount of characters you type in a language is one of the least important factors in choosing whether to use it or not. It's certainly not the reason that we use it.
- mercurial 12y agoI'm thinking about the golden age of PHP. Lower amount of typing, and typing weak enough that whatever junk you type ends up in something actually displayed. The no-compilation part also lowers the barrier to entry and makes deployment easier. Also features the fantastic ability to break your production code by debugging it on the server!