Comments on: Scottish Programming Languages Seminar http://www.nobugs.org/blog/archives/2005/07/03/scottish-programming-languages-seminar/ Thoughts of a software engineer Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:27:39 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.3 By: Eugene Wallingford http://www.nobugs.org/blog/archives/2005/07/03/scottish-programming-languages-seminar/#comment-3240 Eugene Wallingford Fri, 08 Jul 2005 19:58:55 +0000 http://www.nobugs.org/blog/?p=123#comment-3240 Thanks for the summary. I wish I could go to more seminars of this sort, but they are scarce in my immediate neighborhood. Reading about them is the next best thing to being there! On measuring the productivity difference between static and dynamic languages: I agree wholeheartedly. The difference is more of culture and thought habit than of tools, and measuring productivity across cultures is tricky. Folks just end up thinking, "But that's not even a part of my universe." "The formal side of this talk was a little bit beyond me. I have to concentrate when people discuss Monads formally." I have to admit, with some sheepishness, that reading and listening about monads makes my head hurt. :-) On type-checking as good versus bad: Again, I agree -- vehemently. The presumption of strongly, statically typed languages is that the first step toward being a good program is passing the type checker. This is potentially a very fine assertion, but it has implications for how people think about programs and programming. What if we decided that the first step toward being a good program was something else and designed a tool to enforce this notion? Programming might be quite different! I think that test-driven development is an example of just this sort of thing. Thanks for the summary. I wish I could go to more seminars of this sort, but they are scarce in my immediate neighborhood. Reading about them is the next best thing to being there!

On measuring the productivity difference between static and dynamic languages: I agree wholeheartedly. The difference is more of culture and thought habit than of tools, and measuring productivity across cultures is tricky. Folks just end up thinking, “But that’s not even a part of my universe.”

“The formal side of this talk was a little bit beyond me. I have to concentrate when people discuss Monads formally.”

I have to admit, with some sheepishness, that reading and listening about monads makes my head hurt. :-)

On type-checking as good versus bad: Again, I agree — vehemently. The presumption of strongly, statically typed languages is that the first step toward being a good program is passing the type checker. This is potentially a very fine assertion, but it has implications for how people think about programs and programming. What if we decided that the first step toward being a good program was something else and designed a tool to enforce this notion? Programming might be quite different! I think that test-driven development is an example of just this sort of thing.

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