Is Weak Typing Strong Enough?

article:

• opal.cabochon.com

The strong vs. weak typing issue really gets people worked up. The choice has a major impact on virtually all aspects of your project lifecycle, architecture, and development practices.

Which of the following positions would you say is most true at your company, assuming (for the moment) that you can only choose one of them:

1. Above all, we need stability. We have enormous scale and massive business complexity. To create order out of inevitable chaos, we need rigorous modeling for both our code and our data. If you don't get the model and architecture mostly correct in the beginning, it will hurt you later, so you'd better invest a lot of effort in up-front design. We need hardened interfaces -- which means static typing by definition, or users won't be able to see how to use the interfaces. We need to maximize performance, and this requires static types and meticulous data models. Our most important business advantages are the stability, reliability, predictability and performance of our systems and interfaces. Viva SOAP (or CORBA), UML and rigorous ERDs, DTDs or schemas for all XML, and {Java|C++|C#|OCaml|Haskell|Ada}.

2. Above all, we need flexibility. Our business requirements are constantly changing in unpredictable ways, and rigid data models rarely anticipate these changes adequately. Small teams need to be able to deliver quickly on their own goals, yet simultaneously keep up with rapid changes in the rest of the business. Hence we should use flexible, expressive languages and data models, even if it increases the cost of achieving the performance we need. We can achieve sufficient reliability through a combination of rigorous unit testing and agile development practices. Our most important business advantage is our ability to deliver on new initiatives quickly. Viva XML/RPC and HTTP, mandatory agile programming, frequent use of name/value pair modeling for both XML and relational data, and {Python|Ruby|Lisp|Smalltalk|Erlang}

I like the approach of categorizing weak and strong typing, using project requirements.