Have Static Languages Won?
I hoped to have debunked, though not thoroughly, the myth that dynamic languages cannot scale to power large projects in my recent talk at Pycon CA. Just take a look at Openstack. It&#x27;s powering clouds in CERN and Yahoo! Japan where it provides the infrastructure for delivering earthquake notifications to the public -- a valuable and critical service! And it&#x27;s written largely in Python.<p>It does rely on systems written in static languages and is itself written in one... but dynamic languages <i>are</i> very useful for a class of problem where deferring decisions about specifics until run-time is a huge advantage. Normally this is reserved for exploratory programming but in practice it is also useful for dynamically configured systems that can introspect themselves at run-time and change that configuration or adapt to unstructured input.<p><i>Update</i>: I&#x27;m also one of the unwashed masses that, <i>gasp</i>, didn&#x27;t go to university and study PLT. I still have a dog-eared copy of SICP, The Dragon Book, Concrete Mathematics, et al... and started by making terrible pong clones and text adventures in BASIC on an Amiga 500.