Ruby and Python are helping bring the coolness of dynamic languages to the mainstream, which is good. Some of those people will also have a look at Smalltalk, and like what they see. This comes from this presentation on dynamic languages I ran across this morning - I love this pair of quotes from about 1/3rd of the way in:

In practice, the benefits of type safety turn out, unexpectedly, to be fairly minimal

Often overlooked, the costs of maintaining type safety turn out to be extremely high

That's something I've maintained for a very long time. The class of errors that manifest (static) typing saves you from are the trivial ones that almost never happen anyway. At the same time, they create a maintenance burden in terms of application complexity. To take a simple example, polymorphism in the face of strict typing gets harder and harder, and leads to the hoop jumping that is casting and generics.

One other thing - you can get intellisense-style help from a dynamic environment. It's one of the things on our roadmap for Cincom Smalltalk, in fact (and there's a contributed piece that gives you that now).

Technorati Tags: dynamic typing, static typing