Advantages of Soft Typing This is a continuation of this discussion. The main points for soft typing are as follows. * Compile time type checks. Soft typing can catch the same amount of provable errors at compile time as static typing. * Automatic downcasts. Downcasts are done automatically assuming the program passes type checking. The main argument for explicit casts is that it provides the programmer with more information, but this is a misnomer. One does not have to write down information for it to be shown to him, so long as said information is inferrable. Note: whether or not you believe OCaml doesn't have casting is irrelevant, simply assume that, when I refer to casting, I also mean situations in which it's emulated. * Unimposing. Unless a piece of code is provably incorrect at compile time, the compiler can insert runtime checks.
Researchers Pam Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer found that students remember more via taking notes longhand rather than on a laptop. It has to do with what happens when you're forced to slow down.
In a recent piece called Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing, noted programmer and author Bruce Eckel makes an argument that dynamically typed languages such as Python are superior to statically typed languages such as Java and C++. I've done quite a bit of Python and Java programming, and even a little C++, so I can appreciate his position, but I think the conclusion goes too far. Whether Python is more productive than C++ or Java is one thing, whether static typing in general should be abandoned is quite another.
The Citation Typing Ontology (CiTO) is an ontology, written in OWL 2 DL, to enable characterization of the nature or type of citations, both factually and rhetorically, and to permit these descriptions to be published on the Web.