The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Dynamic Typing for Practical Programs [video]
The presenter focuses on the cost of building software in the first place. Yet, in practice, the cost of maintenance often dwarfs the cost of initial development. This is where statically typed languages hold major advantage of dynamically type ones. In part, thanks to the ease of refactoring with modern IDEs.<p>The presented studies can hardly be used as a basis for making his arguments. The study where a student invests a new language that nobody else could possibly know is especially bad. Of course the learning curve is going to be longer for an invented statically typed language! You cannot assess productivity without factoring out the initial learning time. If anything, that study only shows that dynamically typed languages are easier to get into.