"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

Search This Blog

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Exploratory Coding

In a dynamic language I can modify a small bit of code and run just enough tests to try those changes. Then I can progressively run more tests and fix those that are broken because of my changes.

Is there a way in Haskell, or Scala for that matter, or OCaml, to "suspend" checking on things that are "already typed" in order to do something similar?

Another way of looking at this is it is "exploratory programming" -- I may break all kinds of things I don't care about as long as I can fix them incrementally as my explorations settle out.

i.e. I don't want to tell the type checker something should be typed ∀α.α. I just want the type checker to allow me to work on one small things even though I may have broken type checking for a lot of code I am not worried about at the moment.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Here's one take.

Blog Archive

About Me

Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.