In a world filled
with the threat of war, with midterm elections that once again
demonstrate the self-destructive credulity of the American people,
with the collapse of the American economy due to the greed and
stupidity of the American elites, is now the proper time to talk
about the looming crisis of weak type checking in our programming
languages?
Yes, now is the
time. The need has never been greater to stop this foolish slide
into moral decay and socialized health care.
The promise of
weakly typed or untyped languages such as Javascript is that you can quickly and flexibly create new data structures,
complex data structures, and not get bogged down by being forced to
go through your entire system and make everything work together in a
very pedantic, and literal way. You can throw together arrays and lists and pass them as parameters and feel a certain pleasant lack of mental overhead in doing so.
This can be very
productive but it can also generate a false sense of correctness when
in fact one has introduced a subtle incompatibility which the system
is blandly ignoring for a while, only to fail in a non-trivial way
when you are least expecting it.
In fact, it is
shocking how well a system like Javascript is willing to accommodate
undefined variables, functions, incompatible types and just keep
moving along as if nothing was wrong.
But having seduced
the programmer into a false sense of security, it then waits for the
program to reach a certain size, or grow to more than a single
programmer, and suddenly the author or authors of a program have to
start tracking down a bug that comes from one side not enforcing or
maintaining a data structure in the way to which it was intended, or
partially implemented, or perhaps implemented but then changed due to
incomplete knowledge.
The larger the
system, the more people who contribute to a system, and the longer
the software is in use and being evolved, the more likely this is to
happen. And when it happens, one is left without the tools to find
the problem other than reading the code carefully and providing ones'
own type checking.
How could this lead to the end of civilization? It can do so in two different ways. The first is that by permitting this mental weakness, this accommodation to those who would advocate weak type safety, we are letting those who are more lazy enter into a position of responsibility in society. This is certain to lead inevitably to sloppy programming resulting in falling buildings, collapsed bridges, exploding nuclear power plants and God only knows what else.
But second, this nation is under relentless attack by inscrutable oriental criminal elements that are sponsored by their evil, slave owning, government. Can you imagine their glee whenever they penetrate another freedom-loving web page or program in America that has been left defenseless by a weakly type-checked programming language?
We must stand firm against these efforts to leave America defenseless against these threats and rebuild American strength through strongly typed languages.
Thank you.
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