When Less is More
Ian Bicking hits on one of the intangible benefits of dynamic languages:
Back to reliability: one way to decrease bugs is testing, but another way is to decrease the amount of code. Code deleted is code debugged. Static typing can decrease the number of bugs, but decreasing the amount of code is a much, much more effective way to decrease bugs. If you can have both -- short code and static typing -- then more power to you. I just haven't seen it myself.
Whenever I read about some of the larger blog server systems, I'm absolutely stunned by the amount of code involved - the core of this server is 21 classes - plus 4 for generating the syndication feeds, and another 24 for the various servlets running (it's one class per servlet - you can do that differently, but I didn't). Less than 50 classes for a fairly full function blog server. And yes, having less code makes it far, far easier to manage.
Comments
Do you have pointers to sizes of other blogging systems?
[John Lam] December 15, 2004 9:13:42.264
I'm curious about how your system stacks up with others.
Dynamic Languages Not Always Shorter
[Alex] December 15, 2004 10:55:16.609
Interestingly (and of course with many caveats) OCaml programs are among the shortest (and fastest) - no explicit typing because types are inferred, polymorphic typing allowing the "experimentation" style of programming, and compile time checking for silly type errors.
(See the various "shootouts" e.g. Shootout)
OCaml
[Ian Bicking] December 15, 2004 11:57:38.549
Someday I need to better learn OCaml. But anyway, I'm still unsure about how well it works, simply from the fact that there aren't that many OCaml programs out there -- even with a derth of programmers (which may be undeserved), those programmers that exist should still be very productive (if the language is really so great). Produced work is one of the most important judge of a language, to me. There are some real, finished programs you can use -- Debian has unison (like rsync) and advi (a DVI viewer; somewhat surprising). It would be interesting to hear what the developers thought of their experiences with OCaml.