alt Hacker NewsI don't recall anyone disliking types. Lots of people disliked static typing, or more directly static, explicit typing. For instance, I've been around many conversations over the years where people would say goofy things like they couldn't use Python because it's untyped. That's insane: Python is strongly typed. It's also dynamically typed, which is a different dimension.
There are some genuinely untyped languages, or more typically "stringly typed" ones. I hacked around on AREXX as a youth, where all values are strings, even when they look like numbers. Most of the Unix CLI tools like sed could be, uh, said, to be stringly typed. Most of the "discussions" about typing, though, involved Python and similar dynamically typed languages. I don't think I've ever heard someone claim that weakly typed or untyped languages were great for building large project. I've heard plenty of people claiming that Python couldn't be used to build large projects because it was dynamically typed, or "untyped" as they wrongly described it, which was confusing to those of us using it to build large projects.
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Puthon is so strongly typed it lets you assign a string to an integer variable, and or compare the two or add a float and an int. Or multiply an array by a number; something which gets overturned if you use numpy. Python's strong typing mostly boils down to some operator rejecting mixed types.
haven't seen this flamewar in a while. can't say I missed it. surprised people still argue about it, having written my first Python around 1.5.
for the record - I agree completely.
(glad people are over the unicode thing!)
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> I don't recall anyone disliking types
> where people would say goofy things like they couldn't use Python because it's untyped. That's insane: Python is strongly typed. It's also dynamically typed, which is a different dimension.
hmm maybe you don't understand type-checking INSIDE IDE, NOT during runtime?
There's a school of thought that consider the term "types" reflect to the properties that exist in programs even before they are run, as in they are a property of the programs themselves, not their state at runtime. This thinking—which is also what type theory talks about—does consider Python untyped: reading a Python program along with its specification, you are not able to assign types to each expression.
But what Python does have is tagging: when you create an object you tag it, and then whenever you operate on those values, you check the tag and maybe raise an exception or not. This is happening at runtime.
Strongly typed and weakly typed do not seem to have good definitions. A good one I've read is that "strong typing describes the typing you like".
It is great though if people go to the same extent as you to define what they are talking about, as this reduces the chances of misunderstandings. But it should not be taken as fact that the definitions you have chosen are the universally accepted ones.