[grumpyprole]

The evidence you provided was for strawman arguments, something you accused me of. I'm sure Smalltalk can be easier / more "productive" than Haskell, but I never made any claims about Haskell. I'm sure many static type systems are bad, but it doesn't prove all are bad. You didn't provide evidence to address any of my specific issues with OOP, e.g. pervasive mutable and hidden state is an impediment to composition.

For the record, I happen to really respect Fred Brooks, Alan Kay and a lot of what OOP has achieved (for example first-class modules). I called Brooks an "academic" as an acknowledgement that he has made big contributions, not as a putdown as you seem to imply. You are trying to paint me as an FP zealot, but I use both and appreciate the best parts of both. It is you that are coming across as heavily biased. Even your domain name has "object" in it.

Enjoy your objects!

[mpweiher]

What you wrote is "Fred Brookes is just one US academic." That is not a positive statement or an acknowledgement that he has made big contributions, that is a dismissal of what he wrote.

   ./sentiment.st 'Fred Brookes is just one US academic.'
   {
     label: neg;
        probability: {
            neg: 0.5681116649451591;
            neutral: 0.4912856963089782;
            pos: 0.4318883350548409;
        };
   }

The key is the "just one":

   ./sentiment.st 'Fred Brookes is one US academic.' 
   {
       label: pos;
       probability: {
           neg: 0.4517101153187268;
           neutral: 0.4880877595448765;
           pos: 0.5482898846812732;
       };
   }

And replacing the "one" with "a":

   ./sentiment.st 'Fred Brookes is a US academic.'
   {
       label: neutral;
       probability: {
           neg: 0.4032643317660632;
           neutral: 0.7398809320488215;
           pos: 0.5967356682339368;
       };
   }

So we go from -0.57/+0.43 for your formulation to +0.6/-0.4 for a neutral formulation, a swing from negative to positive of 34%. Pretty substantive, if you ask me.

The sentiment.st script:

   #!env stsh
   #-sentiment:text
   (ref:http://text-processing.com/api/sentiment/ postForm: #{ #text: text }) 

Anyway, glad to hear that this statement of yours was not a reflection of your actual views.

[Caper Jones: Smalltalk twice as productive as Haskell]

> I never made any claims about Haskell

You made claims about FP and OO in general, and in particular questioned my statement that "OO gets the job done" and also claimed I provided no evidence for my claims. Haskell is an FP language and Smalltalk is an OO language, and both are considered premier exemplars of their respective genres. Being twice as productive sure sounds like "getting the job done" to me and there is empirical evidence for this being true.

> I'm sure many static type systems are bad, but it doesn't prove all are bad.

Nobody claimed that all static type systems are bad. However, the evidence is in that any claims of "obvious" superiority of static typing over dynamic typing for safety are plain wrong. Such as your original claim:

> Static typing is (obviously) safer than dynamic types.

Glad to see that you're now walking that earlier categorical statement back to "not all static type systems are bad", something I can agree with. I am actually pretty sure some are fairly good, particularly the non-bondage-and-discipline ones (gradual/hybrid) have a decent chance.

As a matter of fact, I am currently in the process of improving the fairly minimal type support in my own programming language. And I even have some ideas in the back of my mind of how to do non-horrible generics, but that isn't the primary focus.