21–30 of 192 posts
so, by swiching from python to haskell, you can get code that's 20x faster for no extra development time? sounds like a win to me. (cherry picked shootout data - http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/which-programming-lan... )
My feeling about this has always been that dynamically typed languages will save time on initial implementation and small projects, and statically typed languages will win on large projects and things that require more maintenance. They acknowledge this, and didn't find anything to contradict it.
Their own graphs seem to show that effect too. In some areas, dynamically and statically typed languages were equal, while in others dynamically typed languages had lower times. I don't actually see where the conclusion that a "static type system had no effect on development time" came from, it appears that it had an overall (if not very large) negative effect. Just like I would expect for a small (27 hours) project.
I didn't crunch the numbers though, maybe I'm just eyeballing it wrong. (again, I can't seem to copy-paste out of it, and I don't feel like reentering all of them)
My big problem with this study is that the project sizes and teams are too small. Static typing really starts to get it's power as the team and project get bigger. This is especially true as the skill levels from larger teams start to spread from amazing all the way down to terrible. In smaller teams you can often work with higher quality developers, but with larger corporate systems, you don't have that luxury. You…
I've never seen these consistent wins you talk about, despite my years at some of the largest corporations.
Studying individuals is the wrong experiment. Static typing benefits tooling most when you have larger groups of programmers who much collaborate, often asynchronously. It's easy to hold a mental model of the code you write in your head and minimize mistakes, it's harder to hold a mental model of a larger program consisting of code written by many programmers. I'd like to see them hand a pre-written codebase of say,…
so, by swiching from python to haskell, you can get code that's 20x faster for no extra development time? sounds like a win to me. (cherry picked shootout data - http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/which-programming-lan... )
only 20x? What happens when you reevaluate it with the python code not having any pieces that are C under the covers? (my understanding that a lot of python idioms for fast code basically turn into ah "use the approach that pushes as much work into C as possible")
Studying individuals is the wrong experiment. Static typing benefits tooling most when you have larger groups of programmers who much collaborate, often asynchronously. It's easy to hold a mental model of the code you write in your head and minimize mistakes, it's harder to hold a mental model of a larger program consisting of code written by many programmers. I'd like to see them hand a pre-written codebase of say,…
I tend to find the strongest proponents of static typing are the least familiar with dynamic languages
An interesting study, but really hard to compare. It's like attempting a discussion of the effectiveness/efficiency of Engligh vs French (using conjugations or sex).