And here’s the definition for you — a “tweet-up” is when a bunch of people on Twitter decide to all go do something, largely because of the hype about it on Twitter. The “de facto” part comes from the fact that nobody’s actually called it a tweet-up or acknowledged that it’s going on, but the effect is happening anyway.

In short: the tiny pool of people that are both F# junkies and Twitter junkies seem to be descending on Code Mash.

Jesse said that typoes and method missing exceptions weren’t a big problem in his life. For him, more power to him, and I totally see why a dynamically typed language is attractive. But they’re a big problem in my life, so I need the crutch.

And if that makes me stupid, so be it.

BTW, Hamlet, there’s a de facto tweet-up forming at CodeMash for F# people. I’m going to be part of that shindig, since you’ve sold me on F# and my frustrations with OCaml’s build system have outweighed my adoration of the language. Hope you can make it, too!

So, yes, I agree that keeping all the types in your head can become tricky. If you’re writing a library in some language, then isn’t needing to reason about variable capture, garbage collection, and closure implementation on the underlying platform a sign that your language isn’t abstracted far enough away from the machine? I believe _good_ static types let you create more and more abstract entities, letting you code your most general ideas while hiding the details for you behind a compiler. Good dynamic typing let’s you jet past the productivity of those stuck with bad static typing (ie Rails vs Struts), but I suspect good dynamic typing might not approach good static typing (in some areas) for your reasons here.

Just a thought. There are of course no real answers to the debate.