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by Obie Fernandez.
Original Post: Gosling FUD is Laughable
Feed Title: Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?)
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Feed Description: Obie Fernandez talks about life as a technologist, mostly as ramblings about software development and consulting. Nowadays it's pretty much all about Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
Another was about testing, reliability and maintainability. One of the common properties of scripting languages is brevity. This tends to lead to omitting declarations, weak typing and ignoring errors. Generally a great thing if you're quickly putting something together; not so great if you want checks and balances that crosscheck correctness.
That is laughable, especially coming from the father of a language that spawned a generation of exception swallowers. Thorough unit and functional testing is the best way to crosscheck correctness -- believing that static typing has anything to do with it is the best way to instill a false sense of security!
Another is generality. Many scripting languages get a good part of their coolness from being specialized - by having key functionality wired into their hearts. A good example is pearl, with it's great regular expressions and hash tables. But this drags in a number of issues, chief among them being: what if you want to do something outside the language's area of specialization? Many modern apps need to do exactly that, so one of two things happen: languages get used for wildly inappropriate things (fourier transforms in PostScript), or a collection of languages get used together (which can make it very hard for any one person to understand them, and interconnections can be a nightmare).
By the way James, it's Perl, not pearl, and you should put a book on logical reasoning and argumentation on your xmas list this year. Good grief.
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