Some people love dynamic languages. I don’t. This last week, I found one more reason for it. I might be a bit biased because I love Scala, but lets go for it.

A project I started maintaining a few weeks ago is written in python. I don’t know much python yet, so there is this fact in and by itself. And I must say I’m liking the language. Now, the fact that it is dynamic has already bitten me at least twice.

In one of those, I was trying to understand why a test I just wrote was not working. It was as if one line was being simply ignored… Well, looks like I discovered by accident that I can call methods that doesn’t exist, at least on some objects or classes. I had a misspelled method name. As soon as that was fixed, everything worked fine. Half an hour lost with a problem that the compiler / interpreter should really warn me about.

The other case was a property in an object that simply disappeared. At a certain point in a function, it was there. A few lines later, in the SAME function, it was not anymore. At least this time it was simple to find the problem: a reassignment was being made, which was changing the type of the object.

Again: changing the type of the object. With an assignment. Yes, from a static language lover, this just feels absurd. There is no way this was going to happen in a statically typed language.

Lets end this rant on a positive note. I am liking python. Still, I would like it much more if it was statically typed.

By the way, we are going to have a new scaladores meeting in Sao Paulo on Feb. 23th. If you are in the region by then, please stop by. More information (portuguese) here.