Re: [xml-dev] JavaScript (was Re: [xml-dev] Whither XML ?)

[Uche Ogbuji <uche@ogbuji.net>]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 8:16 AM, Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> wrote:

On 11/11/2010 12:34, David wrote:

My concern about JavaScript in the browser as the "VM of the Browser" is its lack of binary data support.

I think the poor support for primitive data types is one valid objection. Another, expressed eloquently by Steven Pemberton in his talk at XML Holland this morning, is that a language with weak data typing is increasingly hard to debug as the size of the program increases: the larger the program becomes, the greater the distance between the point at which a program is wrong and the point at which the symptoms appear; so development effort is much worse than linear with the size of the program.

Sorry, but I think this is nonsense.  It's a popular theory among users of strongly-typed language, but it doesn't stand up to real world examination.  Plenty of very large, very complex systems are written in weakly typed languages, and I do not think there is good evidence that these are more buggy than those that aren't.  Typing is just one sort of constraint, and it's a generally artificial type that rarely matches real world constraints.

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