Return of the Statically Typed Languages

http://beust.com/weblog/archives/000483.html

by lackbeard • 18 years ago

8 10 18 years ago

beust.com

Hexstream• 18 years ago

If I'm going to read an opiniated piece, it might as well be insightful.

mullr• 18 years ago

Indeed. This is downright inflammatory.

jrockway2• 18 years ago

Yeah, this guy is clueless. I could do a point-by-point on how he's wrong, but I don't have time to nitpick everything. What about this: Emacs users need to evolve? To what?

There is nothing else like emacs. Sure emacs lisp could use some help (some of us are working on adding coroutines for parallelism), but that doesn't mean it's dead. If anything else were like emacs but better, we would all ditch it.

Summary: this guy is fucking clueless. He's an IDE-wielding weenie that has only ever used Java. Great.

mlinsey• 18 years ago

Some of those observations were interesting, but I'm not sure how they fit together, and I didn't come away with a clear understanding of the author's arguments for statically typed languages...

jrockway2• 18 years ago

His argument boils down to "I like Java, and saying that it's only around for political reasons is wrong. After all, I like it! Yeah, it's true I've never bothered learning much about anything else, but still... my opinion is somehow relevant because I have a blog."

mxh• 18 years ago

I didn't much agree with this guy's post, but here's where he really lost me:

"Javascript is on the verge of becoming part of the assembly language family, and toolkits like GWT are making sure that this will happen before too many developers join the pool of low level language victims. I'm sure you can relate to that stigma."

In the first place, JS is a neat little language that, with a few (okay, a lot) more libraries could easily serve as a replacement for Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. Categorizing it as 'low level' or 'assembly' -like seems like a terrific mistake.

In the second place, the assumption that someone would rather work with Java/GWT than JS seems a little provincial. His point seems to be that he would rather code Java than JS, GWT makes that possible so .... everyone will use the tools he prefers. I think there's a flaw in there, somewhere.

In the third place, what 'stigma' is associated with the 'assembly language family', and/or what makes someone a 'victim' of a 'low level' language? Everything has its place, and while it's only rarely useful, a background in ASM is an excellent foundation for a programmer's knowledge. ASM is also useful for solving the occasional nasty bug, understanding security vulnerabilities, working with bytecode, and reverse engineering for fun and profit.

The third point may be minor, but it really poisons the whole article, for me.

sanj• 18 years ago

Strangely, just yesterday, I got this email in my junk account:

Subject: My name is Cedric Beust and I caused you to get unwanted email

Message:

Hello,

I am Cedric and I blog on beust.com.

I have allowed everyone's email to be exposed throught my sloppy, weak security. I work at Google and this secruity lapse reflects poorly on Google too of course.

If you received this email, then your private email address has been scrapped from my weblog and posted to http://www.newsreadersite.eu/?page=562

This error on my part cannot be undonw of course. The mailbots have already scrapped your email address and now your address is runined forever. I hope it wasn't important to you.

I like to talk about important things like computer languages and architecture on my weblog, but I know so little about security that I allowed all of your addresses to be scrapped.

Sorry I am so lame,

Cedric

schtog• 18 years ago

this is really fun if its true.

estall• 18 years ago

I got the same email. And I found out it was true. I googled the email address to which it had been sent and in fact, it was online at http://www.newsreadersite.eu/?page=562

Which goes a long way towards explaining why I have started getting SPAM on a previously clean email address.

The original author is correct, if you are a system architect at BEA and then you move to Google and you still can't keep a blog site secure, it is pretty lame.

stcredzero• 18 years ago

Method name renaming was licked in Smalltalk, even in things like specs (which predated XML, but served much the same purpose.) So long as everything's an object in the image, you're fine. (Excepting goofy things like constructing message sends at runtime.)

Things like properties files and pickled objects that left the image -- you aren't covered then. But there's little you need those for that you can't do in-image.

Return of the Statically Typed Languages

Related Stories