In [link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=87094|this post], [link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/user?userid=28|CRConrad] decided to provoke Ovid (me). I am provoked :)

Regarding the subject of namesake, while my full legal name is "Curtis Allen (sic) Poe", my two favorite poets are Ovid and John Davidson and I wanted a username to reflect this. The problem with the latter name, aside from the decided lack of "kewlness", is that people might mistake me for [link|http://www.johndavidson.com/|white bread boy].

As for your comment about being a strong-typing-and-binary-compilation "bigot", I have to rise to the bait. Since getting flamed is a rite of passage, I gots to gets me asbestos undies and fall into your fire pit.

I immediately think of an incident where Randal Schwartz was at a function where both Java and Perl were being discussed. This was at a university and Randal was taking questions from the audience. One student (the sort who probably doesn't understand why he should look both ways before crossing a one-way street) asked Randal how he dealt with Perl's lack of strong typing. Randal replied "I just smile and move my programs into production before the Java programmer has his first compile".

Regarding binary compilation: so what? What are you gaining? If you say "hiding source code", debating you is probably as productive as arguing religion with an evangelical Christian :) If you say "performance", I'll respond "If the program is fast enough for the end user, it's fast enough, period." If you choose a language because it compiles to a binary, this strongly suggests the dangers of premature optimization ("Every program must be compiled to a binary because they'll all run faster!").

We routinely write Python programs that run on a user's desktop and the user would never realize that he or she is using a non-compiled language. These applications are as responsive as native Windows apps and blow Java out of the water. How? Because we use wxPython. That's written in C++. The parts that need to be fast are written in a faster language. The rest of the app doesn't need that sort of performance, so we've elected not to spend seven times as long writing in a "compiled" language when there's no reason to do so. As a result, we produce products fast, we save money and our customers are happy. If we had elected to write out desktop apps in Visual C++ or Java, we'd already be out of business.

Mind you, I don't argue that everything should be dynamically typed. If you're doing bin inventory and you try to add 7 apple objects to 8 orange objects and you actually get 15 objects as a result, what type are they? Are they superclass (Fruit) objects? If you want the sum total of Fruit, that's okay, but it's probably not what you want. Comparing apples and oranges ain't gonna fly for an inventory system (ask any grocery manager and he'll agree, if if he's not sure what the hell I'm talkin' about). In other words, use types if you need vectored data (is that really a term? I'm not sure). Admittedly, strong typing will prevent me from adding an apple to an IP address, but if I'm trying to do something that stupid, strong typing is the least of my problems.

(I'll skip blathering about performance one can gain from strong typing. See my comments about compiling)

Cheers,
\r\nOvid