Why are smart developers in love with dynamically typed languages?
When are they using these languages? I am betting that they use them to help generate code their type safe languages. Does that mean that the dynamically typed languages are better? No. Dynamically typed languages lack frameworks (currently) to produce large systems. And the frameworks will never exist until a large company, like IBM, Sun or Microsoft stands behind a dynamically typed language and says "This is the way of the future." Sure, Python has a couple of web frameworks that are available and PHP has several billion, but neither has the following that ASP or Java has.
Perl had a chance. I cannot tell you why Perl did not become the defacto server side language, but I would think alot of it had to do with timing. PHP has a chance if Sun really pulls it into Java, but I would hope Sun would see Groovy as a better alternative than PHP. Python and Ruby are probably the two strongest dynamically typed languages, but neither of them have the corporate backing to become the next Java, VB or C++.
I was a dedicated PHP hacker at one point in time in my life, and then I started writing my web apps in Java. I cringe everytime I have to go back to PHP because it makes me feel dirty and unwashed. I believe it is because of the weird things like how PHP handles method overloading, which drives me bananas. After I left PHP for Java I gave up on dynamically typed languages. Maybe I should give Python or Ruby a try.
Posted by carl at June 8, 2004 11:21 PM
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