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by magicalhippo 1705 days ago
> This page surveys a bunch of studies on the question of dynamic v. static types and finds the evidence in favor of static types to be surprisingly small

Most of the studies seem to be rather poor though, so difficult to draw any solid conclusions from them. Almost all seem to drown in noise, or have flawed setups.

From personal experience, with a static type language I can jump into an unknown codebase and make non-trivial modifications much, much faster than if it's a dynamic type language codebase.

I've wasted soooo many hours doing print(dir(x)) in Python it's far beyond funny.

On the flip side, over the years I've helped countless people with their C/C++/Delphi code in minutes, frequently using libraries and API's I've never seen before.
1 comments
fiddlerwoaroof 1705 days ago
Yeah, the evidence here is mostly anecdotal but, while we’re trading anecdotes, I think you have to distinguish Smalltalk/Clojure/Common Lisp from other dynamic languages. Most dynamic language essentially work like statically-typed languages without typechecking: you put code in a file and then run it all at once (or run unit tests) and see what happens. The languages I mention actually bring your development environment to runtime (twisted manhole and pry are the closest things I can think of here) so, you don’t have to run the whole thing, you can just run the parts you care about and see what they do.

That being said, my experience isn’t the same: I’ve been able to make helpful changes to dynamically-typed codebases in roughly the same amount of time as to static codebases. I’ve never really identified what it is about how I approach code that makes a difference here, but I think it is because I think about changes in terms of operational equivalence (e.g. l.map(a).map(b) === l.map(compose(b, a)) ) rather than in terms of data types.

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magicalhippo 1705 days ago
This is actual JavaScript code, from one of my projects:

    function processAudioData(data, callback) {
       // dump audio data to WAV file  
    }
It's implementing a callback from a library.

Even reading the source code of the library I had problems figuring this one out. Had it been say C# code I'm pretty certain I would have had it done in seconds.

How do you solve this in seconds? I'm genuinely curious as this is something I often struggle with when having to use say Python or JavaScript.

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