Some more thoughts on the (allegedly decided) Static vs Dynamic debate.

I know, I said the debate were decided - at least for me. But one little uneasy spot remained - the unexplicable attraction to Clojure and all things Lisp. It's not a sweet spot for dynamic languages in general - I'm always sligtly annoyed when I use Python with its exception-based type system, so there's no risk of cognitive bias here.

Last week I stumbled upon "Letter to a young Haskell enthusiast" here.  It's a relatively long post containing several good piece of advice, but what resonated with me at most was the following:

Learn to value all opinions, because they all come from experiences, and all those experiences have something to teach us. Dynamic typing advocates have brought us great leaps in JIT techniques. ... Like you, I would rather write in Haskell. But it is not just the tools that matter but the ideas, and you will find they come from everywhere.

So (paraphrasing) I'd rather write in C++, but when seen in that light, it's just a personal opinion or maybe even a preference. Because:

But be glad that others are charting other paths! Who knows what they will bring back from those explorations.

 That reminds us of being merely humans, with no solid uderpinning of our knowledge other than "it seems to be working" (science) or "it always worked that way" (non-science). So maybe the "unreasonable" usage of dynamic typing can bring us some big gains that are unthinkable as of today. And maybe the unexplicaple attraction to Lisp-y languages is a hunch of this glorious future? ;)

This said, I must reiterate that I can't see any logical (meaning "coming from reasoning", not "if you don't thing that way you are a moron") argument to prefer static typing to dynamic one. But I reiterate it with a much broader and understanding stance ;).