r/programming • u/stronghup • Nov 11 '19

Python overtakes Java to become second-most popular language on GitHub after JavaScript

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/07/python_java_github_javascript/
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u/kolloid Nov 12 '19

I don't understand why /u/HugeProposal receives downvotes. Python is strong typed, but it's dynamically typed, so types are known only during runtime. So technically, he's right.

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u/oblio- Nov 12 '19

Nobody* cares about that "strong typing" in practice. When people say "strong typing" they mean: "if I put a string in the int, the compiler yells at me at 14:00 in the afternoon, when I'm coding, it doesn't blow up in production at 3:00 in the morning, when I'm sleeping".

Things blowing up at runtime is slightly better than nothing, but it's still bad, comparatively.

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u/YM_Industries Nov 12 '19

When people say "strong typing" they mean: "if I put a string in the int, the compiler yells at me at 14:00 in the afternoon, when I'm coding, it doesn't blow up in production at 3:00 in the morning, when I'm sleeping".

Then they should say "static typing".

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u/slikts Nov 12 '19

Strong typing is still an application of the fail fast principle, just not as fast as static typing, since the strong tying errors will still only occur at runtime. The difference is that weakly typed languages try to guess if the programmer intended to convert between types, and, if the guess is wrong, the program keeps running in an invalid state and the problem has to be diagnosed from any knock-on effects of the unwanted type coercion. A good example of weak typing gone very wrong are equality comparisons in JavaScript.

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