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I think it was Rich Hickey who said something like: "What is true of every bug ever found in a program? It passed all the compiler's type checks!"


Fair, but at the same time I've also had a compiler quickly draw my attention to a lot of potential errors thanks to static type checking more than once in the past, particularly when doing hairy refactors.

The relative strengths and weaknesses of dynamic and static languages are greatly exaggerated. Doing type checks at compile time won't make your code magically bug-free. But neither will delaying type checks until run-time free you from the shackles of the datatype hegemony. The trade-off between keystrokes and CPU cycles isn't really even all that much of a thing anymore, what with jitters closing the gap on one side of the fence, and type inference and generics closing it on the other.




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