I know I gave Paul Graham a bit of a hard time earlier, but I have nothing negative to say about his latest essay, Hackers and Painters. He weighs into the dynamic vs. static languages with this great characterization:
… a programming language should, above all, be malleable. A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you’ve already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen. Static typing would be a fine idea if people actually did write programs the way they taught me to in college. But that’s not how any of the hackers I know write programs. We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.
I’m seeing writings all about dynamic vs. static languages all over blogspace. In the meta-sense, it’s really interesting to see a common topic over such a wide variety of individual writers. Good writers, must first be good readers.
I also was quite struck by this insightful, but disheartening observation:
Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don’t win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.
The only slightly contrary point I’d make about the whole essay is that experimental scientific research is a lot more like debugging than he realizes.
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