Re: Strong Typing, Dynamic Languages, What to do?

[Matthias Felleisen <matthias@ccs.neu.edu>]

Jerzy -- you are correct in that efficiency matters. Some thoughts: 

1. How it can possibly matter to beginners (<= 2 years of training)? 
   They don't even know how to write a correct program. 

2. In most software, including engineering and scientific software,
   there are many different criteria: 
	    Correctness 
            Reliability 
            Robustness 
            Maintainability 
            Testability 
            Reusability 
            Utility 
            Performance 
   If we don't teach about these and why they matter, we neglect important
   things. 

3. Whatever we do, we should not teach full Scheme, full Haskell, or full
   ML in a university course. The emphasis should be to show how one can
   build programs that measure well according to the above. 

4. The FP community spent two decades of energy on making programs run
   fast. Perl and Python didn't pay attention, they come from behind, and
   they win. So does efficiency matter to get the "market share"? 

5. Once you have market share, you have demand and resources to spend on
   making your languages efficient. Otherwise it's premature. We just don't
   have the manpower that is behind Fortran or C compilers. Considering
   that it is absolutely amazing how well FP languages do. 

Enough said -- Matthias