Re:Language War - Scala versus Python
by ajtulloch on Wednesday February 20, 2013 @11:06AM
(#5251177)
Well, it's not like type checking is a binary attribute of a language - for example, Haskell/ML have 'stronger' type systems than Java/C++.
In the former languages, you can encode many more attributes of a program into the type system, and so you can have check at compile-time many more invariants of your program - e.g. enforcing a function does no I/O, enforcing that all possibilities are handled when pattern matching, enforcing the equivalent of nullptr checking, etc.
In languages like C++, there are techniques you can apply to allow the type system to help you out a bit (see this talk by Jordan DeLong for some examples [1]), but in general, the guarantees you get from a non-HM type system are weaker than those from one, and so the notion of successfully passing type-checking is correspondingly weaker.
In the former languages, you can encode many more attributes of a program into the type system, and so you can have check at compile-time many more invariants of your program - e.g. enforcing a function does no I/O, enforcing that all possibilities are handled when pattern matching, enforcing the equivalent of nullptr checking, etc.
In languages like C++, there are techniques you can apply to allow the type system to help you out a bit (see this talk by Jordan DeLong for some examples [1]), but in general, the guarantees you get from a non-HM type system are weaker than those from one, and so the notion of successfully passing type-checking is correspondingly weaker.
[1]: http://vimeo.com/55674014