Types for an Untyped World: Bracha vs. Felleisen [video]
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Exactly what do I mean by this? The good Smalltalkers would code in a such a way, that people could rapidly and completely figure out what "type" was in every variable, and reliably keep track of all implicit "Interfaces."
So of what value was Smalltalk, if you had to do all that manual work? The fact that what would be "types" in other languages were handled as conventions. This made exploratory coding very rapid.
This is also why I appreciate Go's pragmatic language design around this issue: The compiler keeps track of these things for you, but doesn't require nearly as much bookkeeping from the programmer to have that happen.
Now to see what Mr. Bracha has to say.
(Note: Conventional Smalltalk is actually strongly typed. It's just that everything is typed "Object" and exceptions are more or less just normal program execution with one VM built-in to get it started. This is why what other languages would consider "types" are really just conventions.)
I'm sure HN has much more to say in much less time about it.
Types help document code such that I'd prefer an optional typed languages wherein libraries and large code bases are expected to be typed but the glue on top doesn't need to be.
Javascript in particular is not very self documenting but I find typescript much easier to read. It's a real shame it's not often adopted if only to provide IDE hints.
I feel like whenever you have complex data hierarchies static typing just makes the whole thing manageable (recently wrote 2k loc python exporter for blender and prototype to consume it in C# - the C# is much more managable for this kind of thing, c++ is still kind of tedious because of shitty tools, build/module system and it's fairly verbose due to low level nature)
You should look at Kotlin, I can't imagine any good reason to use Groovy on Android with Kotlin around.
* it isn't 1.0 yet (guaranteed to have breaking changes)
* I don't see it as a dynamic/prototyping language - I see it more as a C# than as Python, frankly for the front end code that I want to write the python style of development is much faster and Groovy seems to have an answer if the performance of dynamic typing ends up being an issue. Most of the complex datastractures are in C++ anyway and will have a simple/clean interface to the front end
* it's an extra language to learn - not only me but by my coworkers as well. We already took on Groovy with Grails and we have a decent amount of build automation in it (and will have more)
I've learned a lot of languages so far (C++, Python, C#, Java, Clojure, JavaScript and I've played with Rust, F#, TypeScript, Objective C) - frankly the value of having as few languages as possible to share the actual code/tools/knowledge between different areas is huge and in order to introduce a new language to the mix it better have a significant benefit over the ones already used.
There are a few pros, though, one of which being that JetBrains is fully behind Android, and as a consequence, the Kotlin runtime is very small. Do you know how many methods Groovy's is?
I think you will also find out that Groovy's performance is going to be a problem on Android, but maybe it will be fast enough for you.
What answer is this? Groovy's statically type compilation mode? You're better off from a QA perspective just using Java code.
Most gradle build scripts are fairly short (e.g. 30 lines) and only use a minute subset of the Groovy grammar, so you don't really need to learn it. Any problems with the build script are far likely to be with the Gradle vocab than the Groovy grammar, e.g. the names of variables you're assigning to, or whether you've included them all.