Dynamic typing good practices?

[Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng]

Once again I have seen a long thread on Dynamic vs Static typing.
That's OK, it's an important thing to discuss and understand.
When I was formally taught programming it was with a staticly typed
language. Had I actually been through a taught course on a
dynamically typed language this next question would probably not arise:

What are the good programming practices of particular merit for
dynamically typed languages?

AFAICS the main one seems to be test driven design/development.
Yes, this *can* be applied to statically typed languages, but has
particular merit in languages like Ruby.

Are there others that I really ought to know about?

Hugh

[Martin DeMello]

Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng <hgs@dmu.ac.uk> wrote:

> Once again I have seen a long thread on Dynamic vs Static typing.
> That's OK, it's an important thing to discuss and understand.
> When I was formally taught programming it was with a staticly typed
> language. Had I actually been through a taught course on a
> dynamically typed language this next question would probably not arise:
>
> What are the good programming practices of particular merit for
> dynamically typed languages?

What I find dynamic languages like Ruby help with is an aggressive
elimination of boilerplate code. If I find myself doing the same thing
over again, I usually stop and refactor the code before proceeding; in
the long run it makes the code easier to develop and more maintainable.

martin