Dynamic Typing is becoming fashionable

3 May, 2003

With the rise in popularity of test-driven design, people are starting to wonder whether the type-safety provided by compiled languages is redundant. Does having good unit-tests mean that it's safe to develop large systems in dynamically-typed languages like Ruby and Python?

I trace the meme back to an artima.com interview with Guido van Rossum, discussing Strong versus Weak Typing. More recently, Uncle Bob Martin posted an article asking Are Dynamic Languages Going to Replace Static Languages?. And now, even Bruce ("Thinking in Java") Eckel is questioning whether strong type-checking is all that necessary.

Anyway, as Dave Thomas says, even Java is Untyped.

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