Tracy,

I'm not necceserily disagreeing with you on what you say. However if the scope the the title of the thread which is: "Why design patterns are easier in dynamic languages"

The level of expresiveness talked about below is a sidenote and not directly related to the topic in question. The higher the expresiveness, the less code you have to write. The devil is more in the statement of "The only thing missing is dynamic typing (not duck typing), which I’ve come to realize is has a lot more going for it than lots of folks in the strongly and statically typed world would care to admit."

Design patterns as described by GOF is to a high level because of working arround problems that have to do with static typing in one way or another. The factory case that Dragan is mentioning in this thread is just an example of it. Virtual classes, parameter overloading etc, are mechanisms that have been invented to keep the compiler happy with compile time type checking. BTW, I've been been teached on this topic. I've used C/C++ and pascal in various flavours before.

No there are also downsides to dynamic languages, don't get me wrong. But thats for kevin to bring them up (just want to see what he can come up with).

As a reaction to your last note, MS does not further develop VFP, not because of any technical reason having to do with dynamic versus statis. It is mainly a business decision. I also think they missed the boat by not recognising the power of data manipulation despite their recent efforts to enhance this in the latest .NET version.

that is not to say that I did not have a moment of doubt that VFP still had a long way to go to be the ultimate development platform. Aside for 64 bit support, rewriting the whole core, it essentially had to be worked up to the level of navision where all code is IN the database: where most objects were tables (Like many of them they already are in VFP), where source control is just a breeze (Backup of the database). But again I think it was a business decision.

Walter,






>From your links:
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>Shortly after I started using Python regularly as part of the prototyping process for developing new features for RSS Bandit, I started trying out C# 3.0. I quickly learned that a lot of the features I'd considered as language bloat a couple of months ago actually made a lot of sense if you're familiar with the advantages of dynamic and functional programming approaches to the tasks of software development. In addition, C# 3.0 actually fixed one of the problems I'd encountered in my previous experience with a dynamic programming language while in college.
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>FINAL THOUGHTS
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>C# has added features that make it close to being on par with the expressiveness of functional and dynamic programming languages. The only thing missing is dynamic typing (not duck typing), which I’ve come to realize is has a lot more going for it than lots of folks in the strongly and statically typed world would care to admit. At first, I had expected that after getting up to speed with C# 3.0, I’d lose interest in Python but that is clearly not the case.
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>I love the REPL, I love the flexibility that comes from having natural support tuples in the language and I love the more compact syntax. I guess I’ll be doing a lot more coding in Python in 2008.
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>I don't see that as an overwhelming rave for Python over C#. I see it as a preference. I agree with the ease of programming in VFP. I also agree with his statement: Since it is a general truism in the software industry that the number of bugs per thousand lines of code is constant irrespective of programming language, the more you can get done in fewer lines of code, the less defects you will have in your software.
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>I still think that overall dotnet has more capabilities for development than VFP does, and that is just with my limited use so far. However, I still don't see dotnet coming close to VFP with data crunging or ease and speed of development.
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>The strengths of VFP were not universally recognized or needed to keep it alive. Let's be frank, if the development world really wanted it then the customer base would have been sufficient for MSFT to have invested more into it.
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>Did I miss something?