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Martin Odersky says on this interview that types can be really annoying for small scripts but for the other case, big systems (real production systems) the refactoring that it allows and the reliability of your code are a fair (or small) price to pay:
They are probably less important when programming in the small. Types can be in a spectrum from incredibly useful to extremely annoying. Typically the annoying parts are type definitions that are redundant, which require you to do a lot of (finger) typing. The useful parts are, of course, when types save you from errors, when types give you useful program documentation, when types act as a safety net for safe refactoring.
I could not agree more, if I'm doing a 50~100 lines script I'm probably not using a full IDE and the Java anonymous inner class full syntax will not be generated by my jEdit (or any other text editor), so a friendly idiom for closures are really a differential.

At the same time I'll not need to maintain this script for months or years, or might never read it again, hence the possibility of powerful automated refactoring (that for instance IntelliJ of Eclipse provide) are not a need, like they are and we already take them for granted on regular systems that we deploy to hundreds/thousands of users.

Automated refactorings are the open gates to the easy and encouraged evolution of software code, and statically declared types are their very foundation.

Comments

( 1 comment — Leave a comment )
[info]rnaufal wrote:
May. 21st, 2009 04:35 pm (UTC)
Re: Scala creator: static typing is important 'in the big'
I totally agree with him, I'm writing a small Scala program to update my LiveJournal tags and I'm using Scala's local type inference a lot.
( 1 comment — Leave a comment )

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