The Industry choice

[Stefan Axelsson]

Roy Smith wrote:

> In perl, I always use "use strict", but in Python, I just don't feel the 
> need.  Between the exception mechanism and unit tests, the odds of a 
> typo going unnoticed for very long are pretty slim.  I'll admit I don't 
> use Pychecker, but if I was doing production code, I would probably use 
> it as part of my QA process.

Well, I don't have any experience with Python in the industrial setting 
(all my Python has been solo so far). I do have quite a bit of 
experience with Erlang (http://www.erlang.org) though, and while I agree 
that it's not quite as bad in practice as the most vocal static typing 
people would have it, it's not all roses either. The problem with unit 
tests is that they can be skipped (and frequently are) and you also have 
to be certain you exercise all code paths, even to detect a simple typo.

It's not that these survive for 'very long' or (God forbid) to the final 
product, but many of them survive for long enough that they cost more 
than they should/would have. So *if* (substantial 'if' I realise that) 
my Erlang experiences generalises to this case, I'd say the benefits 
would outweigh the cost.

Then again I'm seriously considering going back to Haskell, so I guess 
I'm at least a little biased. :-) :-)

Stefan,
-- 
Stefan Axelsson  (email at http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~sax)