Showing posts with label Dynamic languages. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dynamic languages. Show all posts

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...