typing

[Alexander Williams]

On Wed, Aug 23, 2000 at 03:14:41PM +0100, Sean Hinde wrote:
> Some of the comments came from a guy here who in a previous life spent 7
> years writing SCPs in C. He is finding that he needs to be much more careful
> about typos than he used to be. Old C model - hack it in let the compiler
> find the typos, Erlang model - type it in very carefully and hope that in 6
> months time your typo doesn't cause a breakage. He is feeling insecure about
> some of his code compared to C (!)

I'm not sure I really understand his adopted mindset, though maybe
that comes from having worked in dynamic languages extensively.  

Does he not do integrated testing as he goes?  Crank up a temporary
Erlang node and send in the module/application, then begin unit
testing of the functions over various inputs.  If he does it as he
goes, actually testing interactively as he writes the source, perhaps
he'll be MORE secure about his code, because its been tested a brick
at a time.

Programming in dynamic languages does require a change in operational
development mindset; the compiler no longer catches some kinds of
errors for you, but is better at catching/adapting to others.  Using
the same kind of write-compile-rewrite cycle doesn't make sense.  (I
end up having the interpreter running, and literally "testing as I
go."  Probably end up testing more things that could go wrong than
even the type system would catch, really.)

-- 
Alexander Williams (thantos@REDACTED)           | In the End,
  "Blue Jester needs food."                             | Oblivion
  "Blue Jester needs fuku-wearing cuties."              | Always
  http://www.chancel.org                                | Wins