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Dmitry Jemerov on the future of Java and the NBL: "Honestly, I don't know any language today that would become the next big thing. Groovy is interesting, but it's a dynamic language and has all the problems of dynamic languages. It's OK for small pieces of code. But building something the size of IntelliJ IDEA [in a dynamic language] would be a complete nightmare.

A dynamic language works great when you have a clearly-defined structure of an application, where you know where everything lives, where everything is, and what everything is around you. For example, with a Rails application, you have a very strict structure: You have controllers and views and models, and so on. It's all very uniform. You can easily jump into any place of the application and understand what's around you: Here comes the model, and here's the data from the Web request, and so on. That's easy to figure out.

With a product like IntelliJ, there is no such uniform structure. It's very big and very diverse. In my day job, I have to make changes in many places of the code. Static types are the only thing that lets me jump into any place in the code base and understand what everything is around me. I need to know what things are, what I can do with various things around the code that I need to change. With static types, I see that immediately. With a dynamically-typed language, I would need to spend half an hour investigating what goes where and what is what before being able to make a single change."

Ward Cunningham on IDEs "They're complicated, and you have to learn how to work them -- but boy, when you do, they make those languages start to feel like scripting languages. [... ] Why should we need heroics in the IDE to correct for misguidedness in the language design? If the purpose is to continuously evolve programs for business, then what's suitable is to have clean object models that are easy to read."

Benjamin C. Pierce: "Types – especially very precise ones – are a mixed blessing in practice."