I've been enjoying David Heinemeier's (Ruby on Rails / 37signals) blog lately. The kid has excellent chin, which seems to be a requirement for dynamic language advocates mingling with the static language community. In his latest, Serving the koolaid with the facts, he takes on some of the criticism coming out of the Java weblogs that targets various aspects of Rails that go against conventional static language thinking.

It's really easy to take a concept that fails in a given environment and put it into the that's always bad part of your brain. Later, you see the same concept in a different environment and the that's always bad fiber starts blipping like crazy and your mouth starts saying things like, That's always bad.

There seems to be a trend emerging in conversation between the dynamic and static language camps that I believe is based in this flaw in the human mind. There are so many aspects of dynamic language programming that really just don't work in a static language environment and the opposite is also true; one is an ocean and the other dry land. Unfortunately, this isn't immediately apparent and those with strong backgrounds in one environment have a tendency to misjudge the viability of approaches in another.

Fish? That will never work.

I think the key to overcoming this problem is just to keep on talking. Over time it will become apparent that you can't measure dynamic language approaches under the static language microscope and then maybe we can just get on with things and start figuring out where the two environments can work together. It is perhaps not an accident that some of the most beautiful places in nature are the coasts where two strange environments meet.