The Industry choice

[Hans Nowak]

Paul Rubin wrote:

> You should write unit tests either way, but in Python you're relying
> on the tests to find stuff that the compiler finds for you with Java.

As I wrote on my weblog a while ago, I suspect that this effect is 
largely psychological.  You jump through hoops, declaring types all over 
the place, checking exceptions, working around the language's 
limitations, etc.  So when your code compiles, it *feels* safer.  Like 
you're at least part of the way towards ensuring correctness.  All that 
work must be good for *something*, right?  Never mind that when writing 
unit tests for a dynamic language, you don't check for these things at 
all.  How often do you explicitly check types in Python unit tests? 
IMHO, when using a dynamic language, you don't need most of the checks 
that Java, C# and their ilk force upon you.

-- 
Hans Nowak
http://zephyrfalcon.org/