"Strong typing vs. strong testing"

[Ian Collins]

On 10/ 1/10 02:57 AM, Pascal Bourguignon wrote:
> Nick Keighley<nick_keighley_nospam at hotmail.com>  writes:
>
>> On 27 Sep, 20:29, p... at informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon)
>> wrote:
>>> If you start with the mindset of static type checking, you will consider
>>> that your types are checked and if the types at the interface of two
>>> modules matches you'll think that everything's ok.  And six months later
>>> you Mars mission will crash.
>>
>> do you have any evidence that this is actually so? That people who
>> program in statically typed languages actually are prone to this "well
>> it compiles so it must be right" attitude?
>
> Yes, I can witness that it's in the mind set.
>
> Well, the problem being always the same, the time pressures coming from
> the sales people (who can sell products of which the first line of
> specifications has not been written yet, much less of code), it's always
> a battle to explain that once the code is written, there is still a lot
> of time needed to run tests and debug it.  I've even technical managers,
> who should know better, expecting that we write bug-free code in the
> first place (when we didn't even have a specification to begin with!).

Which is why agile practices such as TDD have an edge.  If it compiles 
*and* passes all its tests, it must be right.

-- 
Ian Collins