Re: Truly later thinking...Honey, grab me another beer

[Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike Pavlak wrote:
> That and the loosely typed variable structure.  These
> issues seem confusing as I am curious why we NEED strongly typed and
> compiled languages to be ENTERPRISE?
>   
Compiled code is faster.  Much faster.  Gads faster.  That's why Java 
has a JIT compiler.

As to strong typing vs. loose typing, my opinion is pretty simple: loose 
typing is a little easier to code, and a lot harder to debug.  So you 
trade off a little front-end work on your part (assuming "you" means the 
person who decided to use the loosely typed language and is using it to 
write enterprise code) at the cost of creating obscure bugs that will 
make the maintenance programmers life more difficult.

Debugging and impact analysis are always more difficult with loosely 
typed languages.  If you can't tell what is ni a variable, you can't 
tell what it's used for and how it will affect and be affected by 
changes in other parts of the system.

Now, does this mean there is no place for loosely typed and interpreted 
languages?  Of course not.  There are always places where various tools 
work best and in my opinion, small specialized programs that run on 
dedicated processors are excellent uses of such languages.  Case in 
point: JavaScript is great for rich client interfaces!

But I'd much rather my data were strongly typed in my enterprise 
applications.

Here's one man's example of the perils of loose typing:

http://www.barneyb.com/barneyblog/2004/11/10/loosely-typed-languages/

Joe