It’s expert panel time at the Rocky Mountain Software Symposium, and one of the first questions was “What do you guys think about the whole static/dynamic typing debate?” (I suspect he was a plant, because before the panel started the panelists had decided that they wanted to talk about that issue if they could.)

Ted Neward said a couple of interesting things. I don’t want to misrepresent him, because he ultimately said that he is now questioning all of the assumptions that he’s always believed about static typing. But I was interested in what he said those assumptions were, and I guess the purpose of this blog entry is to question those assumptions on Ted’s behalf.

One of the assumptions was that static typing really helps security analysis on platforms (like Java) with mobile (and therefore possibly untrustworthy) code. The VM (or interpreter, or what have you) is able to use the type safety to help enforce the security model.

When Java first hit the streets, mobile code was a hot topic. General Magic was promoting their Magic Cap environment, featuring mobile code (“agents”) heavily, and powered by a language called Telescript. Nathaniel Borenstein was researching “active mail”, sending active invitations and the like via email using a dialect of Tcl called Safe-Tcl. Someone (I can’t remember who at the moment) was developing roughly equivalent functionality in Perl (the Safe.pm module). Luca Cardelli at DEC was developing a beautiful and novel little language called Obliq.

All of those languages supported secure mobile code, and all of them used very different security models. My memory of Telescript is fuzzy, but I know for a fact that Java is the only one of the rest that is statically typed. And I remember from my evaluation at the time that Java and Telescript had the two most complex security models (and complexity is not a good thing in a security model).

Static typing is one of the tools you can use to build a security model, but there are many others.

(Part 2, part 3.)