3 Dec
2014
3 Dec
'14
7:19 p.m.
On 2014-12-04 04:01, Toby Thain wrote:
I think I said exactly that. Just look at what you quoted.
You are starting to sound like a bigot. You are not reading what I
wrote, but instead are just trying to preach.
Depends, and varies per person.
I believe I just ruled out education above, and noted that better tools
are the only hope. Why are you repeating what I write, while trying to
argue against me?
We only differ in the reason why things looks the way they do today. And
reasons do not actually change what is needed.
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
On 03/12/14 9:45 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Any comments like that just make me take the person less seriously.
Either you are forgetting it, ignoring it, or you are writing really
trivial programs.
This argument is so old, and so tiring.
Can't we just bury it?
Yes, some bugs will be caught by stronger types and more type checking.
The same stronger type system will cause people to swear and be upset
and try to work around it from time to time.
I don't see this happen. It certainly doesn't happen to me. However, dynamic langs waste hours and days of my time
debugging.
That is a potential downside, yes. How much varies per person. Just as
the "have to work around the type system" time varies per person.
Some people
are better at not making silly errors than others, but all
people sometimes do create errors.
People who are more prone to create errors will obviously gain more from
type checking.
We *all* make errors. However,
I've found that this same group of people are
also very creative in writing logical bugs in programs, which no type
system ever will catch.
Essentially - stupid programmers will create bugs in any language.
*All* programmers. "A sufficiently smart programmer" does not exist. Unfortunately,
as education moves more and more into just teaching stuff
like Java and Scheme, people understand computers in a more and more
abstract way, and start doing more and more weird broken things that
people 40 years ago would never dream of doing since they would be
thinking of how this translates into machine code much more.
Abstraction is your friend. It is there to help you make fewer errors.
Most bugs can be traced to working at the wrong level of abstraction.
(And also a lot of wasted effort.) So in the end,
with people getting less proper education, a stricter
language is our only hope. But for people who are good at programming,
the obstacles of stricter languages becomes annoying and reduces
productivity, for much less gain.
Education isn't the answer. Better tools have always been the answer.
This business is culturally unable to admit that some tools are just bad.