[erlang-questions] Why is Erlang what it is?

[t ty]

My intro to FP was via Haskell and prior to that I used Eiffel. I'm a
fan of static typing however I haven't seen empirical evidence
supporting the statement that static typing reduces testing. To be
fair Dominic did say *might*.

You also bring up a good point. If the compiler, to paraphrase Ulf,
goes medieval with your code until you conform aren't you just
replacing testing effort with coding effort ?

Furthur more the purpose of testing is to find defects not to prove
they do not exists. i.e. the amount of testing should not decrease,
after all your static checking typed inferred compiler might have
typing bugs too :)

t

On 12/14/06, Serge Aleynikov <serge@REDACTED> wrote:
> Perhaps the most compelling experience would be by trying it by
> yourself.  Download the OCaml compiler from http://caml.inria.fr, try to
> write any small program, and get it compiled.  The first thing you find
> will be that the compiler will curse at you all the way until you
> finally manage to write the code free of type-related issues and get
> rewarded by obtaining an executable program that will likely provide
> correct results on the first run.
>
> On a separate note, the presence of static typing would indeed make
> Erlang more efficient at run time.  However the benefits that we get in
> it using strict typing work quite well for what the Erlang language and
> run-time were designed for.
>
> Serge
>
> t ty wrote:
> > On 12/14/06, Dominic Williams <xpdoka@REDACTED> wrote:
> > [snip]
> >
> >> It seems to me this reasoning, although, valuable, does not refute the
> >> argument that static typing might have /saved/ you a lot of testing effort.
> >
> > Is there actual empirical data showing static typing actually saving
> > testing effort ?
> >
> > t
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>