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Adding static typing to Python

Brian Quinlan brian at sweetapp.com
Mon Feb 18 21:01:00 EST 2002 
Peter wrote:
> You have drawn a false assumption there Brian, you assume that 95% of
my
> bugs are due to misnamed variables - I wished! :-) That wasn't what I
was
> trying to imply or state with that statement.
> 
> Strong typing requires that you design before you code (Extreme
> Programmers beware! :-)) - therefore by the time a clean compile 
> is achieved 95% of the bugs *are* out :-) That is one of the 
> primary advantages to strong typing, it *forces* you to do the design 
> up front otherwise you will never get a clean compile.
> 
> You should try it one day :-)

I'm a reasonably competent C/C++ developer so I have experience working
with statically typed languages.

I don't see how they force you to invest more design effort before you
code. I have written a fair bit of C code, which (eventually) compiled,
without doing any design up front (the UTF-7 codec in core Python is one
such example :-). 

However, I often do more design work with C++ before coding, but that is
because the weaknesses in C++ makes it more complex to achieve the
desired semantics. I can hardly credit that as a good thing.

Cheers,
Brian
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