In general I appreciate this article for trying to explain something complex in simple terms, though there are many aspects I think it over-simplifies. One of the big ones is that a lot of the performance on modern computers depends on memory access and this article doesn't mention that at all.
The reason I'm commenting though is because of the following quote. "You don't have to wait for the compiler to finish before testing your code modifications because there isn't a separate compilation process. This makes the debugging process much faster and easier." In my experience, this is outright false. The lack of a compiler might let you start debugging faster, but it doesn't make finding and fixing bugs faster. Indeed, I would argue that it normally makes debugging much slower. An example that I saw from one of my students last year was that in JavaScript he had typed gc.fillstyle=... instead of gc.fillStyle=.... He spent hours looking for this error and didn't find it before he came to me for help. In a statically typed language that typo would have been found in seconds with a modern IDE or at worst minutes by the compiler. Thanks to the joys of dynamically typed languages though he spent hours on it. This isn't just an issue for students. My own experience as a professional developer has led me to hate dynamic languages for anything more than a few lines of code because of these issues. Typos that should be found by tools immediately become serious debugging sessions in JavaScript, Python, or other dynamically typed languages.
Thank you so much Mark for putting this forward! There is just so much going behind the scenes for every language that it made it difficult for me to pin down on a common conclusion.
I totally agree with your point that this article does not cover every aspect. When I was researching about this, there was no place where I could practically understand it. So I just took and initiative to make it simple so that beginners like me would get an idea.
Thanks to experienced people like you who can provide us with knowledge that even the internet can't. I'll research on the memory aspect and improve my article. Thank you so much once again 🙌🏻
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In general I appreciate this article for trying to explain something complex in simple terms, though there are many aspects I think it over-simplifies. One of the big ones is that a lot of the performance on modern computers depends on memory access and this article doesn't mention that at all.
The reason I'm commenting though is because of the following quote. "You don't have to wait for the compiler to finish before testing your code modifications because there isn't a separate compilation process. This makes the debugging process much faster and easier." In my experience, this is outright false. The lack of a compiler might let you start debugging faster, but it doesn't make finding and fixing bugs faster. Indeed, I would argue that it normally makes debugging much slower. An example that I saw from one of my students last year was that in JavaScript he had typed
gc.fillstyle=...instead ofgc.fillStyle=.... He spent hours looking for this error and didn't find it before he came to me for help. In a statically typed language that typo would have been found in seconds with a modern IDE or at worst minutes by the compiler. Thanks to the joys of dynamically typed languages though he spent hours on it. This isn't just an issue for students. My own experience as a professional developer has led me to hate dynamic languages for anything more than a few lines of code because of these issues. Typos that should be found by tools immediately become serious debugging sessions in JavaScript, Python, or other dynamically typed languages.Thank you so much Mark for putting this forward! There is just so much going behind the scenes for every language that it made it difficult for me to pin down on a common conclusion.
I totally agree with your point that this article does not cover every aspect. When I was researching about this, there was no place where I could practically understand it. So I just took and initiative to make it simple so that beginners like me would get an idea.
Thanks to experienced people like you who can provide us with knowledge that even the internet can't. I'll research on the memory aspect and improve my article. Thank you so much once again 🙌🏻