Re: Interesting essay

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 4:10 PM, Roberto Ierusalimschy
<roberto@inf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
> Or is it? One thing all these texts ignore is that the features that
> make very easy to write the first 80% of the solution are the same
> that make it hard to write the last 20%. For instance, flexibility
> and dynamic typing favor neither stable implementations nor proper
> documentation.

I grant you that it requires discipline and design to use dynamic
languages in large systems. Lack of explicit type annotations means
that the quality of the interfaces depend on the commenting quality.
But documentation is work, and it is not terribly rewarding work.

Thinking about programmer productivity and dynamic languages, I think
that they are 'programmer amplifiers', magnifying both the strong and
weak aspects of the programmer. The only cure for that is more
collaboration, where (hopefully) the idiosyncracies of the individuals
get smoothed out.

steve d.