Elliotte Harold jumps the shark (with an assist from Cedric Beust) with this:
there is a bigger problem with dynamic languages in general, and this problem has been completely underestimated so far, which probably explains why dynamic languages are not making fast progress in developer mindshare.
This problem is the lack of IDE support.
*Cough*
I hardly know where to start with such nonsense. I suppose I could mention that Smalltalk has had auto-completion available for years, and that it was first implemented (and integrated into the tools) by customers. There may be a lot of Eclipse plugins, but how many of them are created as a "I wonder if I could..." thought over a couple of hours? Not many, I'd warrant. But just ask these guys - there's no IDE support in dynamic languages, so it didn't actually happen. Cedric manages to keep digging:
Auto-completion in IDE's has become extremely smart these past years. Refactoring is also a practice that modern developers have become completely hooked on, and for good reasons.
IDE's for dynamic languages come nowhere close to this level of functionality, and whenever I program in Ruby or Groovy, having to leave my IDE of choice is not only hard, it sometimes makes me decide against using the dynamic language, even if it's a clear winner on paper.
Ahh yes, for the examples he picks an Open Source project that isn't funded by a large corporation (I'm speaking of Eclipse), and a language that was dropped into the JVM and then forgotten. No mention of Smalltalk, or Lisp. Would it be too hard to have a look at the ancestors of all dynamic languages?
And refactoring? Where do Cedric and Elliotte think that was invented? I'll give them a hint - it wasn't here. Or here.
These guys need to go here, or here - grab Cincom Smalltalk or Squeak. See what power tools look like.