Duh Typing

The meeting of the SDForum SAM SIG last week was interesting, however the discussion afterwards over a beer was just as interesting. I will write about the SIG meeting another time, here I want to capture an idea from the after session.

There is a lot going on in the world of programming languages, dynamic versus static languages, strong versus weak typing. Proponents of dynamic languages like Python and Perl claim that they are superior because you do not need to continually specify the type of an object, particularly when the type of the object is obvious.

Over a beer someone proposed that this continual restating of the type of an object should be called Duh Typing (a play on Duck Typing). I ran into an example of Duh Typing today when I found myself writing the following Java statement:

ManagedTasks[] managedTasks =
(ManagedTasks[]) tasks.toArray
(new ManagedTasks[tasks.size()]);

The dynamic language guys would laugh at the fact that I have to specify the type 3 times in a single statement. Well, it is not quite as easy all all that as I will discuss in future posts. In the mean time here is a neat name for the concept.