Or tired of the serious programmer “authority”
Once again, I’ve stumbled upon some annoying claims... I quite often see things like this on the net:
This is what verbose/rigid languages like Java and C# are about. You may call it a waste of typing and lost productivity, but for the huge projects out there, there just is no other way.
Who says that? GOD? Is it one of the ten commandments?
Are there some reliable studies / statistics on that subject? It would be very interesting to have real objective knowledge about what works best (in which condition, for which people), instead we have religion wars.
The advantage of low level language was/is speed. Static typing was needed by the static (ahead-of-time) compiler. It was not made to be verbose and “safe”, it was made to guide the compiler. It annoys me so much when people now say it’s good because it’s safer! They cling on an historical habit for the wrong reasons and without evidences!
Now with JIT, static-ness is not that much important for performance and was never important for making development safer! I know static-ness could ease the work of heavy IDEs and refactoring tools, but please stop with that safety meme…
I would like to see real case / stories where a non trivial bug was due to e.g. using an object of the “wrong” type. How static typing really saved your day? How rigidity could help more than a good testing discipline etc? And don’t say it’s better if you have bad programmers; anyway you’re doomed if you have bad programmers!
Software development is probably more an art, a craft than a science, but I get quite annoyed by all the empirical / religious claims about what is good, what is bad!
All this “authority” argument bs like “for real project with 100 developers and 1000 tables, millions lines of code blabla: it’s better to use a static and verbose language” or “it won’t scale”: doesn’t look very objective to me! Just FUD by people clinging to their habit!
Do whatever you prefer, but am I supposed to be impressed!? Am I suppose to believe that because it come from a person that might have worked on a bloated and heavy project!? Are we always suppose to believe “enterprisy” and “serious” authority figures? (do you always trust bankers, politicians)?
Haven’t Digg, Twitter or Github, – using “dynamic” languages – scaled enough? Does rigidity scales?
It’s like science before “renaissance”, people were only studying/repeating what famous old authority figures were claiming, or common crystallized knowledge instead of looking at the facts.
“The earth is flat”, all people always said that in the Dark ages ;-) but that did not make it true! Is software development still in the Dark ages!?
See Dinosaurs of development should go extinct (but won’t!)
It’s funny, it seems human being like to learn new stuff, but after a certain amount of effort/time spent on mastering a subject, cling on their acquired knowledge and taste. I’ve read somewhere (couldn’t find it again) that your taste in music get fixed/”frozen” by the age of 28 (mean), for food even earlier…
At what (mental) age did we stop accepting “novelty” in programming? What kind of personality is more likely to fall into that “I know enough” pit? Could we create or at least embrace novelty after having reached a certain level of knowledge? It would mean accepting to loose that old (obsolete!?) “excellence” we had! ... This is investment / engagement psychology!...