Dynamic typing 30 years later
By Didier Verna on Thursday, June 24 2010, 15:56 - Miscellaneous - Permalink
When the C++ guys announced support for lambda expressions in the upcoming version of the standard (assuming there's one), I refrained from blogging on the "better 30 years late than never" melody.
Now I got big news for you guys. Today, everybody likes dynamic types. They even dare saying so at ECOOP (which means that ECOOP now accepts those papers, yeah things change).
This year, we had a short introduction to an empirical study about the positive (or at least not negative -- one step at a time, this is still ECOOP --) impact of dynamic typing on the development process. And, cherry on the cake, we had this Microsoft guy who presented a paper about... supporting dynamic types in C# !!
In short, the guy said that he wants to be as fashionable and cool as the people doing all sorts of fancy stuff with their scripting languages (he also said that this was a demand from the C# community).
So that's it. A couple years ago, people suddenly realized that functional programming and, in particular, lambda expressions were a good thing. Today, people are also starting to realize that dynamic typing is a good thing.
So after having endured 30 years of sarcasm about our dynamic types, it's only fair that we, the dynamic languages community, get to be sarcastic now.
Now I got big news for you guys. Today, everybody likes dynamic types. They even dare saying so at ECOOP (which means that ECOOP now accepts those papers, yeah things change).
This year, we had a short introduction to an empirical study about the positive (or at least not negative -- one step at a time, this is still ECOOP --) impact of dynamic typing on the development process. And, cherry on the cake, we had this Microsoft guy who presented a paper about... supporting dynamic types in C# !!
In short, the guy said that he wants to be as fashionable and cool as the people doing all sorts of fancy stuff with their scripting languages (he also said that this was a demand from the C# community).
So that's it. A couple years ago, people suddenly realized that functional programming and, in particular, lambda expressions were a good thing. Today, people are also starting to realize that dynamic typing is a good thing.
So after having endured 30 years of sarcasm about our dynamic types, it's only fair that we, the dynamic languages community, get to be sarcastic now.
