Productivity

I doubt that being able to churn out code faster than before is a good definition of productivity. And yet this seems to be the major appeal of dynamic languages. But the excitement over that things can be expressed with fewer keystrokes draws the attention away from what is really important.

The most important property of a programming language (or any other development tool) is that it should protect us, the programmers, from ourselves.

Programmers make mistakes all the time, and any mechanism that can detect those mistakes as early as possible is simply a good thing. It is not a burden but a benefit that the compiler whines about that you haven't handled the case that the file you are trying to read might not exist.

Not only do many languages neglect to protect the programmers from themselves, they also provide them with new and ingenious ways to shoot themselves in the foot. For example, what on earth made someone think it was a good idea to have a language construct where the number of iterations in a do-while loop depends on whether the loop body is surrounded by block delimiters or not.

I am not arguing that static languages are the right tools for everything. There is no universal tool, and static languages surely suck in their own ways. The point is that dynamic languages are not taking is in the right evolutionary direction. When the strife for simplicity gives us languages that subtly allow new variants of the NASA Fortran bug, we are heading down the wrong path. "Strong typing is for people with weak memories" is a joke that was old already in the 80s.

I am a bit worried that people may be confusing productivity with getting away with sloppy code.