Re: [OT] Interesting answer to why dynamic languages are hard for large code bases

[Francisco Olarte <folarte@...>]

Hi:

On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 5:32 PM, Marc Balmer <marc@msys.ch> wrote:
> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/221615/why-do-dynamic-languages-make-it-more-difficult-to-maintain-large-codebases
> Our own software proves him wrong.  Dynamic languages are very well
> manageable, also with large codebases.

You cannot prove him wrong by having a large manageable codebase. He
says dynamic make it harder. Lots of things make it easier or harder,
you would need to have, at least, to comparable codebases made by
similar teams in a similar way, and prove, or show examples, or
assert, that the one made with the dynamic one was easier to maintain.

I have kilolines javascript programs which are more manageable than
some of my colleagues hundred of lines Java programs, and than my 20
years old C++ programs, I'm just more disciplined and experienced.

I also same age large codebases in dynamically typed ( perl ) and
statically typed ( C++, which when avoiding pointer tricks is very
statically typed, nothing like the 'everything is an Object' java
stuff ) of similar size and I've found the later where harder to write
and difficult but faster to test ( very few stupid bugs escaped, once
the modules compiled w/o warnings very few bugs remained ), and easier
to maintain ( specially after not having touched them in 5 years ).

This does not mean the dynamic ones are not manageable, they are. But
sometimes bugs surface on production due to stupid typos ( and, to
catch them in tests, I would have had to make my code way more
complicated, to the point of test related things dwarfing real
functionality, which is a problem per se and would have killed the
project).

I've also found that my later dynamic language code is way more
manageable because I DO NOT abuse on the things which are possible
with dynamism, and do a lot of things in a similar way to how they are
done in statically typed languages.

And lastly, I've found dynamic languages are particularly attractive
to less experienced programmers. I suspect this also has a lot to do
with the existing state.

Francisco Olarte.