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by wpietri
5464 days ago
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A 'productivity boon'? I don't understand. At the risk of invoking the ancient static vs. dynamic religious war, this statement makes no sense to me. I don't know what they mean either, but my first guess has to do with company size and mobility of staff. I love dynamic languages most when I'm coding solo or with small teams. I don't need to express a lot of things to the computer when they're so clear in my head. But if I'm going to take over an adequately maintained code base, I'd rather it be in a static language, because more of the intent is explicit. At this point Twitter has a lot of engineers and is still growing, and they're in a very dynamic business. It's plausible to me that they get a global productivity boost even though static languages could feel like a productivity hit to each individual engineer. |
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Out of interest would you feel the same if both codebases had adequate test coverage?
In the post one of the reasons given was that with a static language you can pretty much guarantee that a dataflow is going to work, that you won't be caught out by getting the wrong type. I'd see this being most useful at the edges of the system, and in those cases incoming data would normally go through some validation anyway (including through a schema in many cases) which would normally make clear the types involved.
Having said that I do think in those cases being able to specify types can makes things slightly easier for newcomers, I'm just surprised its seen as a big enough advantage to be one of the key motivators to switching language.