Whould you want your surgeon to have a dull knife? ~ Nathaniel Schutta defending dynamic languages like Ruby as ‘sharper tools’

Travel issues prevented me from seeing the very early sessions of CodeMash, which was a shame because I was very interested in Eric Meyer’s talk on how JavaScript Will Save Us All!  (I added the exclamation marks because I think that’s what he really intended).  Still, I made it early enough to sit through a couple very good presentations before lunch, both of which followed a bit of a theme.  One was a love fest for Dynamic Languages as a persecuted, second class citizen given expertly by Nathaniel Schutta.  His message is simple, programmers need to be Polyglots and if you can’t handle learning different languages than you should get out of the business.  Harsh, but dead on accurate.  One of the languages you should have in your tool belt, Nathaniel tells us, is a Dynamic Language and that you can do a whole lot worse than Ruby.  I am already sold on this idea, or was years ago when I was nearly alone in lecture rooms during similar presentations.  Since then the crowd has gotten bigger but the message is still the same.  Most of this revolves around dismantling the arguments for the need of static typing to prevent errors from bad programmers.  Truth is, bad programmers don’t get better when they have a wet nurse hand out brainless advice through compiler warnings or errors.  Take off the training wheels already and let’s get some code written already.

You go though more hoops to do it, but you can do it ~ Venkat Subramanian Mads Torgersen talking about Dynamic languages on C#

Venkat Mads works for Microsoft on the C# language.  Now I am not genetically predispositioned towards this kind of talk, but since it was while I ate my ham on marbled rye, I felt no great persuasion to not hearing the good gentleman out.  Glad I did, though, because there were some interesting things going on in the CLR camp.  CLR itself was a happening idea, a VM that was designed from the beginning to be a shared platform (Common Language Runtime) so the pieces where already there to do something interesting.  However, it seems that early decisions were made to optimise speed for the C# type base on the CLR, leaving non-microsoft languages somewhat at a disadvantage and me somewhat bewildered by the earlier statements.  Dynamic languages, for example, run though a DLR library to get to the CLR.  This Dynamic Language Runtime handles the bindings to Ruby and Python, so IronRuby and IronPython handle the mappings between DLR and CLR maybe?  I was somewhat confused.  If you type something in your code as ‘Dynamic’ it is a Dynamic type in the compiler but then reverts to its true type in runtime to allow for the dynamic langages to duck type the thing.  For a complacated problem, the fact that this solution made perfect sense to someone as slow as me is a good sign that they might be on to something.