I've fallen in love with hybrid systems like Common Lisp. SBCL is dynamically typed, but type inferred and I have the option of adding type declarations to help the compiler out. It's a different way of thinking, you're working on a living system, instead of treating your program as a monolithic block that the compiler has to prove satisfies some static constrain, you work on chunks(functions, classes, etc.) that you compile and test immediately while your program is running, and if you screw up, the system is there to help you figure out what went wrong and fix it, without killing your process. Wetter or not this type of incremental development is better or not for some definition of better, I feel it fits the way I think better. Maybe somebody with a different way of thinking will actually perform worse in such an environment, thats my theory at least. I know I'm faster(and much less annoyed at my compiler) this way.
- Statically checked and removed at compile-time if possible
- Checked at runtime otherwise
- Not checked at all if you compile with high speed and low safety, yielding close-to-C level of performance (complete with memory faults and weird bugs when things go wrong)
Furthermore, I can turn on this high speed/low safety mode in specific portions of my code (inner loops), while compiling the rest with high safety.
SBCL + SLIME + Quicklisp is a seriously awesome combination.
