Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time

Post by Peaker » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 9:22 PM UTC

mjallday wrote: post #138

seunosewa wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the IDE. I use Python with Eclipse. Auto-completion works quite perfectly. Refactoring too.

I disagree. There's simply no way that the IDE can know everything about a variable without running the code and I don't believe that eclipse does this. It's ok at refactoring but it breaks down all the time for me, renaming unrelated variables or missing cases. I don't believe it can handle kwargs for example (no computer in front of me, feel free to prove me wrong)

Post by jbranchaud » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 10:02 PM UTC

kitsune_ wrote: post #64

fusiongyro wrote: post #32

The study may or may not be flawed, but what's really interesting to me is the reaction. We need more science in our computer science, which means more experiments and more results like this. We should also be open to the truth that we use the tools we like because we like them rather than because they're technically superior, even though we pimp them ad nauseum as though they are. I once read an article about a tech…

I don't know how science can help you here. In the case of the improved fan design, well that's easily testable. However, I don't want to go down the rabbit hole and argue social vs natural sciences. I find it dumbfounding that in this day and age, people can still create rather arbitrary social experiments with only 49 people and then think they can draw grandiose conclusions from their "data".

Post by cageface » Sat, Jun 09, 2012, 10:10 AM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #171

cageface wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but remember most static languages are 20+ times faster than Ruby so even with compile times you might still come out way ahead.

Ah, but a lot of bugfixes are developed by making small changes to understand better what is going on internally during the bug symptom, and there the compile time is more important than the compile/test time.

Post by kaffeinecoma » Sat, Jun 09, 2012, 5:05 PM UTC

phamilton wrote: post #163

kaffeinecoma wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a REPL. Just give it a whirl and see what you get. In a large system you might have to jump through a lot of hoops to get an accurate result from the REPL. What if the thing you're trying to puzzle out is 20 call levels deep? As a new Ruby dev I struggle with this.

If it is a pure function it makes the call depth irrelevant. While not always the case, it seems to be pretty common in Ruby development to keep things as pure as possible.

Post by phamilton » Sun, Jun 10, 2012, 6:02 AM UTC

kaffeinecoma wrote: post #187

phamilton wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is a pure function it makes the call depth irrelevant. While not always the case, it seems to be pretty common in Ruby development to keep things as pure as possible.

No, it's not irrelevant. If you're trying to figure out what gets passed up the call stack, you need to trace it through. Being able to plug in your own values into a single method call via the REPL isn't helpful if you're trying to analyze what really happens when it runs. Either you need to run it under a debugger, or manually trace it through. In a static language you just have to read the type signatures.