[ocaml-biz] perception of type safety

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Brian Hurt wrote:
> Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
>
> > Also, the need for strong typing is highly debateable.  An entirely
> > different school of thought is that unit testing is what actually
> > matters.
> > http://www.xoltar.org/misc/static_typing_eckel.html
> > Python people can and will make this argument, successfully.
>
> But this is part of the problem Ocaml faces.  People see
> these problems-
> and they are legitimate problems- with the current popular crop of
> statically typed languages.  The trick is convincing them
> that solutions
> do, indeed, exist.  You can get the benefits of static type
> checking (and
> more) without the bondage and discipline aspects.

My point is the benefits are largely perceived, not provable.  Consider
all the junk that is software today, and you'll realize that software
gets done in the absence of any good mechanism.  It will be a long time
before OCaml has been used on enough big projects to prove to the
mainstream's satisfaction that its type safety is a big win.  Some
Success Stories would help and can probably be conjured up today, but
people really need to see a lot of those big enterprise apps done in
OCaml to believe.

So again, it seems like the plan is to study Java and C#'s marketing
materials, and figure out what they're touting.  Whatever they say is
providing the type safety, whatever people are talking about, say that
OCaml does it better.  The enjoyable thing is that unlike other
languages, we won't be lying to them.  :-)


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.