Comment by incomingpain
12 hours ago
>Vim vs. Emacs,
Nano has always won. Yes, vim is everywhere. I dont fathom why emacs exists.
>tabs vs. spaces
tabs make much more sense. python should fix this mistake. I guess my IDE fixes it for me?
>Mac vs. Linux,
100% linux; i tend to stick to the debian field, but certainly never actual debian. I really need to try alma; but dnf/yum/rpm and what the hell happened to centos? fedora is a mess like it always was. KDE? really we havent found one of the dozens of better DE?
>static vs. dynamic typing
Dynamic, ill never ever switch to a language that's static. I started in C++, never ever going back.
>JSON vs. YAML
JSON all the way.
Why dynamic over static?
>Why dynamic over static?
I started my coding career in C++. I know static well enough for my lifetime. It makes sense that if you're in the 1980s and choose static as the designer of the language.
But now the choice is available, why would you want to declare the variable. In my code I want to write "bob =" and the language figures that all out. If I feed a string into it or a number, why does it matter?
It saves me oodles of time not having to be concerned at all about that.
It's also very interesting in functions. Yes, I have been using the typing in python. def process_bob(self, bob: int) -> bool:
Technically i can shove whatever i want into that arg of bob. Imagine the function was a network protocol. v 1.1 did X, v1.2 did X and Y. That int becomes perhaps a list and that's totally fine. Very reusable, because iterating, process_bob can just become if bob == int: elif bob == list.
Why would I want my programming language to make things harder on myself for literally no gain?
Speaking for myself I'm static or death, BUT I can see how one might come away scarred from C++ and conflate static with the wild degree of ceremony and clunky tooling.
Nowadays the better static languages do a lot of type infererence so that a lot of that ceremony is pushed aside.
I recently did some semi-serious python work and I see some of the appeal; I definitely missed mandatory type declarations at the function argument level but barely if at all within functions.
There's a great Steve Yegge post about this topic of static/dynamic alliegence (via someone's gist because Google can't run a service long term for love or money): https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150