Re: Truly later thinking...Honey, grab me another beer

Mike Pavlak wrote:

That and the loosely typed variable structure. These
issues seem confusing as I am curious why we NEED strongly typed and
compiled languages to be ENTERPRISE?

Compiled code is faster. Much faster. Gads faster. That's why Java has a JIT compiler.

As to strong typing vs. loose typing, my opinion is pretty simple: loose typing is a little easier to code, and a lot harder to debug. So you trade off a little front-end work on your part (assuming "you" means the person who decided to use the loosely typed language and is using it to write enterprise code) at the cost of creating obscure bugs that will make the maintenance programmers life more difficult.

Debugging and impact analysis are always more difficult with loosely typed languages. If you can't tell what is ni a variable, you can't tell what it's used for and how it will affect and be affected by changes in other parts of the system.

Now, does this mean there is no place for loosely typed and interpreted languages? Of course not. There are always places where various tools work best and in my opinion, small specialized programs that run on dedicated processors are excellent uses of such languages. Case in point: JavaScript is great for rich client interfaces!

But I'd much rather my data were strongly typed in my enterprise applications.

Here's one man's example of the perils of loose typing:

http://www.barneyb.com/barneyblog/2004/11/10/loosely-typed-languages/

Joe