January 10, 2007

Dynamic Programming Languages

In an interview with the JRuby developers, Thomas Enebo—one of the developers—is talking about the difficulty in getting the computer to support refactoring (making the code "better" without changing the code's behavior). He says,
Perhaps it's why dynlang programming starts to feel so right...it's putting trust and control back in our hands.

You might say that dyntyped languages trust the programmer to do the right thing where static typed languages force the programmer to do the right thing. That trust opens up a world of possibilities, but it also takes some responsibility out of the computer's hands—namely, responsibility for exactly that information that's needed to refactor.

It does "feel so right"…. Posted by ronlusk at January 10, 2007 03:12 PM