May 08, 2003
Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing

Bruce Eckel (of Thinking in Java fame) writes about why static typing is pretty much redundant if you are unit testing properly - Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing.

It got to be said, though, that statically typed languages have one big advantage over dynamically typed ones - their GUIs can provide much better auto-completion. This was mentioned on c.l.py recently, but I'm not sure that I agree with Martin's view that this can be fixed. Imagine that you'd entered this:

def myFunction(anArgument):
    anArgument.

At this point, which methods can your IDE suggest? Pretty much none at all, I'd say.

Not, I hasten to add, that I think that this advantage of static typing overrides the advantages that dynamic typing can give you - see Bruce's post for that side of the story, expressed rather better that I ever could hope to do.

Posted to Python by Simon Brunning at May 08, 2003 01:13 PM
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