Re: "no variable or argument declarations are necessary."

> This is naive. Testing doesn't guarantee anything. If this is what you
> think about testing, then testing gives you a false impression of
> security. Maybe we should drop testing.

Typechecking is done by a reduced lamda calculus (System F, which is
ML-Style), whereas testing has the full power of a turing complete
language. So _if_ one has to be dropped, it would certainly be
typechecking.

Additionally, testing gives you the added benefit of actually using your
decelared APIs - which serves documentation purposes as well as
securing your design decisions, as you might discover bad design while
actually writing testcases.

Besides that, the false warm feeling of security a successful
compilation run has given many developers made them check untested and
actually broken code into the VCS. I've seen that _very_ often! And the
_only_ thinng that prevents us from doing so is to enforce tests. But
these are more naturally done in python (or similar languages) as every
programmer knows "unless the program run sucsessfully, I can't say
anything about it" than in a statically typed language where the
programmer argues "hey, it compiled, it should work!"

Regards,

Diez
Received on Sat Oct 15 04:10:48 2005