Comments on: Static vs. dynamic typing of programming languages

By: paddy3118

paddy3118 — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 08:39:53 +0000

Oh, I work for an enterprise. And my software needs to deliver. One of your rebuttal replies was from someone in the banking/financial industry.

I guess Python will remain a “secret sauce” for your companies competitors.

By: Jay Q.

Jay Q. — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 08:32:57 +0000

Obviously you haven’t worked on an enterprise level application. Try working for a bank, financial institution, or the airline industry. There’s no way around it, no matter what language you use.

By: paddy3118

paddy3118 — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 08:26:21 +0000

Try Python. You might be surprised at how often the mindset of the Python programmer leads to solutions that don’t require hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

As problems get bigger you can measure bottlenecks and replace the bottleneck with routines written in other languages but still controlled through Python.

Remember, the goal is to solve the problem.

By: Jay Q.

Jay Q. — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 08:15:40 +0000

A large scale project that takes 2 weeks to build? That’s just ridiculous.

I like python, but dynamic languages can only go so far when you start hitting hundreds of thousands of lines. Then it becomes a bitch to maintain. It doesn’t scale well in that aspect. Refactoring and static typing becomes your best friend when you start working on projects that involves thousands of classes.

I’ve worked with enterprise applications all my life, I have yet to see python or any dynamic language used as the main language.

By: Joseph

Joseph — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 07:49:01 +0000

Python’s no good for large-scale projects, huh? How about this from Thanos Vassilakis, then a programmer for NYSE:

———–
” On the New York Stock Exchange we use three languages in production to deliver serious trading services to the Specialists: c, C++, Python.
Perl, tcl/tk, Java are used but for scripting, tools, and minor services where performance and memory foot print are not an issue. Yes, used correctly Python meets our performance, security and reliability requirements.
We have had Java projects and launched Java services, they have all failed. We have many in the pipeline (thanks Big Blue) but NYSE’s only serious internet based service is written in Python, and was launched in 1998. It is still up in it’s sixth version, with no down time! The fifth version was rewritten in Java, 6 months overdue, failed, and replaced by python ( which took two weeks).
Here at SIAC and NYSE Python is recognized by management to give results that other languages just can’t achieve.
For performance we have extended Python with our own specialized c objects, and we have used swig extensively to integrate to our legacy code, and middleware.
Thanks Python, you let me get home to my kids.”

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 23:39:47 +0000

Not really the fault of the programmer but the fault of the Product Manager. They should have assigned a good UI/UX guy on it. The programmer only develops what is assigned to him.

By: Pollo

Pollo — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 19:28:14 +0000

While those programs sound pretty bad, the terrible quality of those programs isn’t the fault of the language, rather, the fault of the programmer.

By: paddy3118

paddy3118 — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 16:31:01 +0000

But remember that design patterns show up deficiency in a languages design. – better languages have less need for the boilerplate code bloat of a design pattern and instead have subsumed most of that into the syntax of the language.
The IDE’s need to be good when the language is so poor. It acts as a crutch to keep the language going. Somehow, too many Java programs are large and complex. With the amount of multi million pond computer systems that are junked each year maybe Java the language steers its programmers to habitually overreach themselves (and their “proper” design)?

P.S strong typing does not equate to static typing. Python is both strongly and dynamically typed.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 22:09:20 +0000

Small benefits in writing slightly more concise code in a scripting language do not outweigh, nor ever will for that matter, the long term benefits derived from strong typed languages.
The fact that you feel oppressed by not being able to assign to a variable any type of object/function like you can in scripting languages like javascript/python is a tad revealing of a lack of strong comprehension of design patterns and proper software design.
You should know that with Abstract classes and with parameterized/templated classes, you can make you solutions as generic as you please, as long as you have the creativity for it.
The IDEs, debuggers frameworks, standards and libarries for these languages, in particular Java, are the best and most mature in the world.

Javascript, for example, is a very nice an flexible language, I like it and find it comfortable to use. I like it even better if I let Google compile it for me from a stronger typed language. However, what I do dislike is the abhorrent code I see programmed in it every day. You can believe me, a Programmer that programs badly in Java will make code 100 times crappier and harder to debug in a scripting language like Perl, Javascript and Python.

By: Rich P.

Rich P. — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 05:39:16 +0000

In reply to: Elwin (2010/08/29 @ 8:24 am) …”abortion of a program”

HAHAHAHH!!! LMFAO!!! Never heard that one before, but with your permission will borrow it heavily in the future for any piece of crap software.