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The .NET Languages blog recently pointed me to an SD Times article by Larry O'Brien entitled "Dynamic Do-Over." Most of the later part of the article talked about IronPython and Jim Hugunin, but the earlier part touched on something that I've discussed earlier: the question of language strictness when it comes to typing. The more I think about it, the more I believe that static typing is a good thing and something that should be encouraged wherever possible. But when I say that, I don't mean to say that there isn't something of value in all those scripty-like dynamic languages out there. I think Larry hits the nail on the head in his article: what makes dynamic languages so great is not their loose type systems, but their dynamic environments.

In the end, I think anything that helps the average programmer be more productive is a good thing. By and large, static typing satisfies this dictum: static typing enables all kinds of programmer productivity features like Intellisense, better error messages at compile time, etc. (One could argue, I suppose, that you could lose the static typing and use type inferencing instead, but I wonder whether it would be possible to build a complete enough type inferencing ruleset that: a) was implementable, b) made some kind of sense, and c) could compete with just stating the damn type of your variables.) Dynamic environments also do this: edit and continue (pace Franz et al.), continuable exceptions, being able to call functions at design time, etc. So I think marrying the two worlds has some facinating possibilities.

I should add, though, that I don't believe loose typing has no use. One application for loose typing that I'm particularly interested in is modeling unstructured or semi-structured data such as XML. I think the work that the E4X group has been doing is particularly interesting...