Re: [OT] Interesting answer to why dynamic languages are hard for large code bases

["Pierre Chapuis" <catwell@...>]

> The author doesn't say it is impossible to maintain a large codebase in
> dynamic languages.
> He says that it is harder than with a static language.

Not my experience if we are comparing, say, Lua to C.

If we gave the same amount of time to two groups of
programmers familiar with the two languages to accomplish
the same task, I would expect:

- the C code base to be larger in terms of LOC;
- the C codebase to have more bugs;
- the C codebase to have worse architecture.

I think the same would be true of Java.

Moreover I would say C code is, in practice,
often typed more weakly than Lua code. For instance,
every time you cast something to void* to use it as
a callback argument, you lose its type, which is
not the case in Lua. So in Lua you will have an
error at runtime, but in C you may have no error
at all...

Of course there are things that are better adapted
to C and others to Lua, etc. More importantly, there
are languages with much better type systems than C or
Java (e.g. Haskell & friends) where I think those
really make a difference in the large.

But "dynamic typing doesn't scale" should not be a
reason to choose a language of the C family IMO.

-- 
Pierre Chapuis