Re^2: Static typing is mostly a waste of time

I find it amusing how many people dismiss Java's static typing as a waste of time and stupid. I image that most of the people saying this are fairly ignorant of java. Static typing might be a pain because you have to do explicit cast. But it greatly speeds up developement time because it catches a lot of errors at compile time that would be very hard to track down when they happen as runtime errors in perl. Just because johnnywant doesn't know how to use typing doesn't make it useless.

That might be true of some people, but it's certainly not true of all. Many people are criticising the typing model of Java and similar languages because they use them a great deal, they get in the way and they make the code harder to understand.

They criticise it because they try using languages like Ruby, Python and Perl and discover that all those nasty things they think will happen without static typing don't.

Take a look at what Bruce Eckel's (hardly somebody who knows nothing about Java) has written about these issues in Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing and Type Checking and Techie Control.

They criticise it because languages like Haskell have been doing compile-time typing in much more interesting and productive ways for years. Good god, Java has only just got around to implementing generics!

(Please note: Adrian may be more grumpy than normal due to having to get his head around possibly the most obscene use of C++ templates he has ever seen. I do not need to see compile time recursion for no good reason before I've finished my first coffee of the day :-)

Comment on Re^2: Static typing is mostly a waste of time

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Re^3: Static typing is mostly a waste of time by JanneVee (Friar) on Apr 14, 2005 at 12:03 UTC
Thank you, no need for me to reply with a little less carefully worded reply along the lines that you just did. I couldn't agree more on this post... I wonder what abuse of C++ templates you are looking at, as for myself I find the ATL library particulary abusing of C++ templates.	[reply]
Re^4: Static typing is mostly a waste of time by adrianh (Chancellor) on Apr 14, 2005 at 14:41 UTC
I wonder what abuse of C++ templates you are looking at, as for myself I find the ATL library particulary abusing of C++ templates. The author of the atrocity had obviously heard that templates were "efficient", so they implemented their little (little - hah!) stream reading class with templates. Except there was a bunch of different behaviour depending on the object so they were continually checking objects typeid() to decide what to do in an massive evil switch statement, which triggered off what looked (after considerable pondering) like the guts of some kind of expression template. Which would be fair enough if there were any chains of expression to optimise out. Since there aren't it's a couple of hundred lines of fardling no-op. The most annoying thing is that it's a massive case of the first law of optimisation (i.e. "don't"). The stuff this monstrosity deals with doesn't happen often, it's running on a machine with oodles of memory, it's taking data of the net and a database so the bottleneck is definitely not the code, etc. Not to mention the fact they invented there own string class! Twice! Use templates badly and then ignore the STL. Fantastic. If they'd just written it as plain C++ classes with sensible use of the STL it would be a quarter the size, work just as well and be perfectly obvious code. I'm going to go write some Ruby so I can feel clean again :-)	[reply]