Ok, I’ll stop after this one (yeah, sure…): The Power of Smalltalk IDE’s:

DOH! When your autocompletion gives you the wrong information it makes it more than worthless, I hope I don’t get people saying ‘oh but its because the IDE doesn’t know what object you’re wanting to complete…’ cause that’ll be playing right into the arms of pro-static-typing….

Ok, here you have it–and you can quote me on it: “yes, this is an advantage of static typing”. So, that’s off my chest.

It’s not like we can’t see any advantage in the dead objects world–it’s just that on the balance, the advantage is to dynamic languages. In my experience, they mesh better with how humans think and work–a bit fuzzy at times, thriving on interaction, thinking fast and switching fast and needing tools that follow them. I don’t think, probably contrary to a lot of static typing adepts, that software is an engineering discipline (some thoughts I wrote up here and here). Tools need to be more like clay than like the machines in a factory assembly line, and a Smalltalk IDE is the ‘clay-est’ tool I have encountered so far…

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