And no I don't think Java's (or C#'s) type "system" should look like Perl's. But something closer to ML, Clean or Haskel would definitely make things much better. You'd get the same kind of compiletype checking, but without having to typecast all the time and without the runtime typing errors caused by errorneous typecasting.
But Haskell/ML don't magically coerece Ints to Strings for you. That just goes to show that the real problem here has nothing to do with static typing, and everything to do with poorly designed libraries and/or poor coding in general. If you have to jump through hoops to get your code to work, you're probably doing something sub-optimal. That's applicable whether you're using Perl, Java, Haskell, whatever.

In reply to Re^3: Static typing is mostly a waste of time by Anonymous Monk
in thread Static typing is mostly a waste of time by johnnywang

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