Sunday, March 27, 2005

Dynamic Languages

Over at DevSource they have a piece on The State of the Scripting Universe. Boy, this scripting engine really is going full throtle. Everyone and his dad seems to have seen the light and gone over to scripting land. Somehow I'm still sitting in "static" darkness. We have discussed this a bit before. I guess it's the fact that I've only had very limited exposure to it... not having developed something "significant". Once you have that kind of experience under your belt it's better to compare it with C#/Java/C++.

I believe scripting in quite big in game development. A friend of mine works at a gaming company and all he does is scripting (some custom developed one) and he's in the design department! From what I understand, all games start out with the engine and you just customize that. The engine is sort of like the platform? And the scripting languages use that as an API? Maybe Dinesh can shed some light.

While on topic, Bruce Eckel had a post last month about productivity between static/dynamic languages. Productivity is one of the apparent key advantages of dynamic languages. In it he links to some dude who writes about Tests vs Type. Read his post to understand what that means.

Personally, I think the "Edit Types" block under "Explicit Typing" is way too big. To me it seems like spending time "editing types" is a way of testing. You bypass this step in "implicit typing". So I think the "editing types" part should come under tests. What dyou think?

Btw, searching for anything on the blog really sucks. I had to find the previous post link manually. Google isn't spidering/indexing the posts properly.

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