In a recent interview, The State of the Scripting Universe Revisited, Lynn Greiner follows up on an earlier survey of dynamic language luminaries to see what has changed in the past three years in the way enterprises use dynamic languages, and what role dynamic languages play in complex enterprise applications.

The interview includes Norris Boyd, an engineering manager at Google and creator and maintainer of Mozilla's Rhino JavaScript implementation; Richard Dice, president of the Perl Foundation; Jeff Hobbs, director of languages and Tcl tech lead at ActiveState Software and a member of the Tcl core team; Steve Holden, chairman of the Python Software Foundation; John Lam, lead of the IronRuby team at Microsoft; and Rohan Pall, representing PHP.

In the the interview, John Lam points out that the debate about languages is moving beyond the question of using statically typed versus dynamic languages, in part because dynamic languages integrate well with static languages, and also because dynamic language implementations have blurred the lines between these two language philosophies to some extent:

Future programs will be written using a mix of static and dynamic typed languages. Use each language where it is best suited: dynamic languages to define DSLs, and static languages where you want to leverage the power of a strong type system for things like static verification of programs or increased performance...

There is a "polyglot programmer" meme going around which roughly says that future systems will be built on a statically typed library foundation (e.g. BCL in .Net) with a dynamically typed language used in a dual role to both script those static types as well as define a domain-specific language (DSL) which will be used to implement the high level app logic...

Compilation is orthogonal to static/dynamic. IronRuby is a compiled language (and an interpreted one too— we offer both options), yet it is clearly a dynamic language. So it's better to say that there are changes in attitude between static versus dynamic languages...

Rohan Pall adds that,

For a large number of applications, when deciding what technology to use, it is no longer the case that the debate centers around dynamic languages versus compiled languages. Scripting is now considered real programming, and indeed most people don't even use the word "scripting" when describing what they do, but instead call it "programming." These days, it boils down to which dynamic programming language to use, not if you should use one...

In the interview, Lam also points out that dynamic languages can also be used increasingly on both ends of client-server systems and Web applications, and that may make it possible to construct Web applications with the same dynamic language used on both client and server:

JavaScript's popularity is directly tied to the fact that it's deployed on virtually all browsers today... I coined the term ARAX to try and drive some thinking around using Ruby in the browser as an alternative language to JavaScript. That generated some interest in the Rails community since they would be interested in running some of their Ruby code in the browser.

Do you think there have been changes in enterprises' attitude toward dynamic languages that the interview didn't bring up?