Do Dynamic Languages Make New Code Cheaper?
Finally, the new economics of dynamic languages like Ruby simply makes reuse a lot less attractive. Since the cost of producing new, original code is so much lower…
Hang a tick, why is new code cheaper with dynamic languages? Sure, you can write the code faster but the vast majority of cost involved in code isn't spent up front, it's spent in maintenance. So writing new code hurts because you don't take advantage of all the money already spent on maintaining existing code and instead incur extra maintenance cost. Even if the initial cost of writing new code was reduced to zero, new code would still be very expensive purely because of the maintenance element.
I might buy it that programmers are more productive using dynamic languages, I can't see any evidence that dynamic languages have any significant impact on maintenance costs. In fact, a lot of the flexibility of dynamic languages can make it very difficult to maintain the code because it can be hard to find where the cause of the fault is.
January 22nd, 2006 at 2:28 am
What is it about languages like Ruby that makes it harder to find faults? You’re naturally still writing tests such that maintenance doesn’t happen in the dark. And when that’s the case, less code is usually easier to maintain than more code (perl golfing thoroughly excepted). The mental overhead required to understand a 3,000 line program is much different from one requiring 10,000 lines.