Interesting. But I'm not sure I agree with one of your axioms: The type checker doesn't just provide rules, it provides guarantees. There are certain things that dynamic programmers have to think about, which static programmers do not - because the type checker does it for them.
Actually, the major problem is that I'm not used to thinking about type at all, because if I hand a Perl function a variable of the wrong type, it will perform the appropriate coercion behind the scenes and Do What I Meant (TM), often magically so (C++ does something similar). From that perspective, there's no difference in meaning between "1", 1 and (1), just a difference in efficiency. The "if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, but you need a gorilla, then stick some fur on it and give it a banana" approach to typing :-)
This is something that puzzles me, actually: I can see the rationale behind strong static typing (efficiency, correctness; it's just that I think there are better (http://smallthought.com/avi/?p=16) ways (http://perldoc.perl.org/Test/More.html) of achieving the desired effects), and I can see the rationale behind Perl-style DWIMmy weak typing, but I can't see the rationale behind Python/Lisp(?)-style dynamic strong typing, where there are no guarantees provided by the compiler, but type errors can still kill your program. "4" + 3 in Python will die with a type error, for instance (partly because they've used + for string concatenation, but still). Does anyone here get this?
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The type checker doesn't just provide rules, it provides guarantees. There are certain things that dynamic programmers have to think about, which static programmers do not - because the type checker does it for them.
Actually, the major problem is that I'm not used to thinking about type at all, because if I hand a Perl function a variable of the wrong type, it will perform the appropriate coercion behind the scenes and Do What I Meant (TM), often magically so (C++ does something similar). From that perspective, there's no difference in meaning between "1", 1 and (1), just a difference in efficiency. The "if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, but you need a gorilla, then stick some fur on it and give it a banana" approach to typing :-)
This is something that puzzles me, actually: I can see the rationale behind strong static typing (efficiency, correctness; it's just that I think there are better (http://smallthought.com/avi/?p=16) ways (http://perldoc.perl.org/Test/More.html) of achieving the desired effects), and I can see the rationale behind Perl-style DWIMmy weak typing, but I can't see the rationale behind Python/Lisp(?)-style dynamic strong typing, where there are no guarantees provided by the compiler, but type errors can still kill your program.
"4" + 3in Python will die with a type error, for instance (partly because they've used + for string concatenation, but still). Does anyone here get this?