Monday, August 11, 2008

Dynamically typed languages are meritocracies

From Russ Olsen's "Design Patterns in Ruby":

"Statically typed languages are constantly asking about your parent or grandparent, or perhaps, in the case of Java-style interfaces, your aunts and uncles. In a statically typed language, an object's family tree matters deeply. Dynamically typed languages, by contrast, are meritocracies: They are concerned with which methods you have, rather than where those methods came from. Dynamically typed languages rarely ask about an object's ancestry; instead they simply say, "I don't care who you are related to, Mac. All I want to know is what you can do."


I love a good meritocracy.

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