The Lurker

Beyond static typing

In a recent review of Bruce Tate's Beyond Java, Joel Spolsky concluded:

To a historian, it's starting to look like type declarations are one of those accidental difficulties that good programming languages can eliminate. Beyond Java is a good summary of the arguments and worth reading.

Comparing Spolsky's Making Wrong Code Look Wrong from last year to Tom Moertel's A type-based solution to the "strings problem", I hope that if Spolsky's right, type declarations are superceded not by duck typing as he and Tate expect, but by type inference. As Cedric Beust put it:

I am all in favor of anything that makes the development process more agile, but if I can ship code that contains errors when these errors could have been caught by the compiler before my code even gets a chance to run, I will seriously consider leveraging this support as much as I can.

(But damn, I just can't get past Haskell's syntax. All those people bitching about Python's significant whitespace were utterly wrong, but if they'd been talking about Haskell I would agree wholeheartedly.)

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