It would really help if people would actually write some large programs in "best of breed" languages like Haskell and Scheme (or on the JVM, Scala and Clojure

It would really help if people would actually write some large programs in "best of breed" languages like Haskell and Scheme (or on the JVM, Scala and Clojure) before they proclaim the superiority of run time type checking over compile time type checking (or vice versa) . This isn't aimed at anyone in particular(least of all Dean Wampler , or any commenters here), but I suspect that without such hands on experience, people are arguing whether the elephant is a big wall like thing or a slender rope like thing.