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program surgery vs. type safety

Aaron Watters aaron at reportlab.com
Wed Nov 12 11:22:54 EST 2003 
I'm doing a heart/lung bypass procedure on a largish Python
program at the moment and it prompted the thought that the
methodology I'm using would be absolutely impossible with a
more "type safe" environment like C++, C#, java, ML etcetera.

Basically I'm ripping apart the organs and sewing them back
together, testing all the while and the majority of the program
at the moment makes no sense in a type safe world...  Nevertheless,
since I've done this many times before I'm confident that it
will rapidly all get fixed and I will ultimately come up with
something that could be transliterated into a type safe system
(with some effort).  It's the intermediate development stage
which would be impossible without being able to "cheat".  A type
conscious compiler would go apopleptic attempting to make sense of
the program in its present form.

If I were forced to do the transformation in a type safe way
I would not be able to do as much experimentation and backtracking
because each step between type safe snapshots that could be tested
would be too painful and expensive to throw away and repeat.

This musing is something of a relief for me because I've lately
been evolving towards the view that type safety is much more
important in software development than I have pretended in the past.

ah well... back to work...

   -- Aaron Watters

===
You were so cool
back in highschool
what happened?  -- Tom Petty
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