Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Me and my compiler

Pfiuu, long time no post, between my day time work, playing with Haskell and Lispy things (cool sutff like Clojure) and my extra-programming activities (yes, yes)...
I was just thinking about dynamically vs statically typed languages, since there is a lot of discussion about that on the web these days. For example, this article talks about refactoring in both static and dynamic languages. Well, I'm not a huge fan of all the refactoring utilities Eclipse give me, but there's one feature I use a lot: you know, when I change something, like the return type or the arguments of a method, my IDE helpfully adds little red crosses on all the source files that won't compile any more. So then I go through them and adapt the code.
Of course in a dynamically typed language I wouldn't get that, but since everybody has 100% code path coverage in their unit tests, it's just deferring the red cross marking a bit lower than the chain, right? Well, at work it takes 30 minutes to build our whole software from SVN (and only a few seconds to rebuild one individual module from inside Eclipse), and several hours to unit test everything (and have we got 100% test coverage?), so... Methinks I'll stick with something that can check that my types are coherent for me when I work on big projects...

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