Wilfred Thinking Aloud

Strong Typing is for Programmers Who Like Refactoring

I somehow prefer this vision on strong typing in favor of the old dynamic language mantra "Strong Typing is for Programmers with Weak Memories", or "Strong Typing is for Wussies". This weekend I read "Programming Ruby". I like Ruby. It's simple. It seems to be pretty fast. It's objects all over the place. It feels like Smalltalk for Java programmers, in the sense that you don't have to deal with an image, like in Smalltalk. It's all plain text.

But I also remembered some conference sessions on dynamicly typed languages that I attended in the past. None of these sessions ever mentioned the fact that refactoring tools can be so much more powerful if the type is known before runtime. Renaming an operation in a large codebase would be practically impossible. Tracing the usage of a class would be equally hard.