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from the a-language-is-not-just-a-bunch-of-words dept.
Up on ACM queue is an article by Bertrand Meyer on the difficulties of feature-based development, and the implications for Agile development methods.
Everyone wants simple solutions. But it is not enough for a solution to be simple; it must also work. The idea that you can specify and build a system by discovering user stories as you go and implementing them one after the other, with some refactoring here and there to clean up the design, is clear and simple, but only in the sense of the famous H. L. Mencken quote ("clear, simple and wrong").
Meyer is probably best known to programmers as the author of the programming language Eiffel and his writings on object oriented architectures. He has also written on agile development methods in detail — the article is based on a chapter from his book.
(Score: 1) by Cheburator2 on Monday February 23 2015, @12:30PM
I also love dynamic typed languages, but there is a limit to what could be done with them in regards to automatic refactoring. You have to have a static type information in order to find specific code patterns or navigate type hierarchy. For example, my project has dozens of classes which has methods with generic names like getName or getValue which in turn are used in hundreds places. Even a simple refactoring of adding a new parameter to such method in a particular class would be a nightmare in dynamic typed project, because you'd have to traverse through thousand of usages and inevitable there would be errors not catched by compiler and not covered by tests. It takes less than an hour for me with automated static typed refactoring and there are usually no errors afterwards.
TL/DR: It's fun to use dynamic typed languages for small projects, but they really limit agility for large projects.