Experiment: Unit testing isn't enough; You need static types, too
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Experiment: Unit testing isn't enough; You need static types, too
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Re: Experiment: Unit testing isn't enough; You need static types, too
#2I wish more of these open questions in coding (and everything) had people making such a good effort to research them! There never is a simple answer, or they'd not be an open question.
Really inspiring, painstaking piece of work.
Re: Experiment: Unit testing isn't enough; You need static types, too
#3Interesting, but worth remembering, as Rich Hickey says, every bug has got past both your unit tests and your type checking.
Re: Experiment: Unit testing isn't enough; You need static types, too
#4It is definitely refreshing to see some actual evidence in something where arguments tend to be based on speculation, experience, or opinion. Now, we just need someone to research Emacs v. Vim, Tabs v. Spaces, etc.
Re: Experiment: Unit testing isn't enough; You need static types, too
#5It is definitely refreshing to see some actual evidence in something where arguments tend to be based on speculation, experience, or opinion. Now, we just need someone to research Emacs v. Vim, Tabs v. Spaces, etc.
Don't forget about braces versus indents, and above all, semicolons or not! :)
On second thought, let's forget about them after all...
Re: Experiment: Unit testing isn't enough; You need static types, too
#6It is definitely refreshing to see some actual evidence in something where arguments tend to be based on speculation, experience, or opinion. Now, we just need someone to research Emacs v. Vim, Tabs v. Spaces, etc.
> Tabs v. Spaces
Not exactly this, but there exists "Program indentation and comprehensibility" http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/papers/Miara1983Program.pdf which tries to tackle the "2 spaces vs 4 spaces vs 8 spaces indent". Not very good tho, since they seem to add superfluous indent levels like a separately indented "then" after "if" (Pascal), which effectively doubles the actual indent of the semantic block.
Re: Experiment: Unit testing isn't enough; You need static types, too
#7Interesting, but worth remembering, as Rich Hickey says, every bug has got past both your unit tests and your type checking.
That statement, though, is almost content-free. It's a truism. If you don't have type checking, then every bug has gotten past your unit tests; but some proportion may have been prevented with type checking. And vice versa. The statement doesn't say anything about the value or non-value of unit tests or type checking.
Re: Experiment: Unit testing isn't enough; You need static types, too
#8I applaud the effort to try and dissect the problem scientifically.
If a whole program has 1 bug due to being implemented with dynamic types over static types, and that bug has gone unnoticed, then it can't be particularly important.
The other common proposition is that dynamically typed languages are faster to write in than statically typed languages. If this is true then we need to compare the saving in development time with the cost of the bugs which go undetected.
My gut feeling says that this line of analysis is never going to prove that static typing in inherently "better".
Re: Experiment: Unit testing isn't enough; You need static types, too
#9How can you translate from python to a static language, when the code is written for the interfaces, and not types? How willl you translate a function receiving a (possibly custom) iterable, when the function doesn't care about the type, but just whether it implements a next() method?
Re: Experiment: Unit testing isn't enough; You need static types, too
#10I'm convinced that dynamically typed languages are a transitional technology that will be superseded once we develop type systems that are both usefully strict but also flexible.
After over ten years working in dynamic languages I'm very happy to have a compiler on my side again.