Simon Lin links to a Bruce Tate PDF on things Java should steal from Ruby. The thing is, if Sun did that, they would actually have either Ruby or Smalltalk. Since both of those exist already, there are shorter steps to productivity than waiting for that to happen.

An interesting aside that Bruce Tate points out - static language advocates seem to think that you can't have refactoring without the manifest typing. This ignores that fact that - like just about everything else - the refactoring browser was invented in Smalltalk.

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