I came to this thread late, and have only skimmed some of the answers, but
I think that the following, somewhat oblique, opinion hasn't yet been
expressed about the, I don't know, maybe ... harassment by "type weenies"
that zcaudate feels. Apologies in advance if I've missed a similar point.
First, I'll note that I agree with many of the comments so far. To
everything there's a season. That goes for type systems.
In what I say next, I'm not trying to offend anyone. I'm expressing
half-baked opinions about what I feel are general tendencies. I am certain
that there are exceptions to *every* generalization I make.
My personal opinion:
Many of us who like programming like it partly because we like order,
systematicity, and elegance, at least in our thinking. We like things to
make sense. Some people have a greater need for this than others, at least
at certain stages of their life. So things that seem more clean and neat
are attractive. Full-fledged static typing has this character. It's
appealing because it's orderly in a very, well, strict sense. I think it's
probably easier to be religious about static typing and provable
correctness as a universal goal if you don't have to deal with a lot of
pragmatic concerns. So I suspect that many type zealots are students or
were recently, and that they'll end up lightening up in several years,
after they've got more experience with meeting the demands of practical
coding. (That's not to imply they'll necessarily give up affection for
static typing, but it's hard to be a zealot after you've freely chosen,
many times, to compromise on formerly rigid principles.) Dynamical
languages are above all oriented toward practical programming needs *in
certain contexts*--in other contexts, static typing is more practical.
Maybe some of the hard core static type advocates will see the potential
benefits dynamic typing when they get more experience. But you can't
*prove*, mathematically, that dynamical typing is better sometimes. Its
advantage comes out in actual *practice* in real-world situations. ("Real
world" doesn't mean business. I'm an academic coding solely for research
purposes (and fun!).)
My 2c.
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