[paulmd]

I guess it comes down to a difference of philosophy. Never in my life have I ever felt compelled to shove an object of the completely wrong type into a function and see what happens. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the answer is going to be "it crashes", so there is no reason to do this.

The point of type-checking is that the function needs to work on a duck, then there is no point to ever pass it anything except a duck. In fact,the compiler should not even let you pass it something that's not a duck, because it's so pointless. That's literally the start and end of static typing, and if that's "rigorous" then yes, the whole point of static typing is to introduce this very basic level of rigor into your codebase. Because it's not going to work regardless of whether it passes the compiler.

Pretending interfaces do not exist does not actually make them go away. There is an interface there whether you explicitly enumerate it or not... even duck typing will fail if you try to call duck functions on something that is not a duck. Dynamic typing is not magic, it's the equivalent of passing everything around as Object or String in a static language. And that's an anti-pattern.

http://wiki.c2.com/?StringlyTyped

If you just want something to compile, you can pass in null-values of the appropriate type.

Now: there is a valid complaint that Java in particular really embraces the architecture-astronaut philosophy where everything is an overly-abstracted AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean (a convenient superclass for FactoryBean types that produce singleton-scoped proxy objects!). But usually it's fairly simple to wall that badness off from your actual business logic.

[unethical_ban]

>The point of type-checking is that the function needs to work on a duck, then there is no point to ever pass it anything except a duck.

If I know I'm only going to pass ducks, and the software is quick and dirty and non-critical enough that it doesn't matter if I accidentally pass it a goose, then I don't want to have a general contractor standing next to me developing saying "make sure that's a duck!"

[paulmd]

> If I know I'm only going to pass ducks, and the software is quick and dirty and non-critical enough that it doesn't matter if I accidentally pass it a goose, then I don't want to have a general contractor standing next to me developing saying "make sure that's a duck!"

There is no situation that is so "quick and dirty and non-critical" that you would want an invalid function invocation that could never, ever possibly succeed.

Again, if you just want a dummy call while you're refactoring so that things compile, pass in nulls in those parameters. But there is literally no reason to ever pass totally invalid but real data to a function.

I'm literally at a loss for any situation where you would ever pass an apple to a function that expects a duck, and think that's not just a valid construct, but a positive one that a language should encourage. It just boggles the mind how stupid that is.

Guess people just hate nulls that much, even as a parameter to a dummy stub, that they're willing to give away type safety.

If you really, really, really want to do a construct like that in a typed language, you can always just do "myFunc((Duck) myApple)" to pass the apple as an instance of type Duck, but if a duck is not an apple then that's guaranteed to fail at runtime, just like in the dynamically typed language (because dynamic typing is not magic).

[unethical_ban]

Let me put it this way.

If am writing something quickly, and it's a small project or test, and I might be testing out whether I want to pass a single value or a list in my workflow, I don't want the rails on constantly. I don't want to guarantee safety by ctrl+H-ing my "str" to "Iterable" constantly. Move quickly, break things, get the product out. At least, when the product is a quick and dirty tool and the options are "spend 30 minutes to get it built" or "don't build it".

[jhall1468]

> The point of type checking is that it has to be rigorous, it doesn't do anything for you if it doesn't check types.

I don't always need to check types. I don't need to know that isReady returns a bool. It clearly returns a bool. This idea that type checking has to be absolute is because in statically typed languages it does, not because that's a forgone conclusion.

[merlincorey]

> I don't always need to check types. I don't need to know that isReady returns a bool. It clearly returns a bool.

I'm sorry but you're mistaken, friend. I checked the signature of that function and it actually returns an enumeration of ready states:

    enum class Ready { Insert, Process, Clean };
    const Ready isReady();

Static typing is extremely useful for knowing what things return - names are not.

[jhall1468]

> Static typing is extremely useful for knowing what things return - names are not.

Only if you completely ignore convention (that is prefixes return bools) then, sure, it's not useful. But if you just want to break conventions, then all of this is moot because you are guaranteed to do stupid stuff outside of that.

[elbear]

Even if you don't want to break conventions, you might do it by accident. If you don't have a compiler (or a static checker of some sort), there's no one there to keep you consistent.

[Too]

You are assuming that your usage of isReady will be flawless every time. What if you call a function updateUser("username", isReady()) but it turned out you remembered the order of arguments wrongly. Then the type checker will tell you as you can't pass a bool to a string argument and vice versa. This type of error is super common in %-string formatting.

It won't help if all the arguments have the same type unfortunally but at least it catches something. Just like unit tests, they won't catch everything so the more checks we have and the earlier we run them the less risk there is something slips through to production.