I never thought that I would miss writing C, but writing Python in a fairly large system, I miss the type checking. Some of the ease of use of dynamicity is pa

I never thought that I would miss writing C, but writing Python in a fairly large system, I miss the type checking. Some of the ease of use of dynamicity is paid back in the added costs of writing more tests. In my experience a big downside of highly dynamic languages that let you hack the language itself, including Python and Lisp, is that they give programmers quite a bit of room to shoot themselves in the foot by designing language-altering atrocities. On the Python system I currently work on, I've found atrocious uses of metaclasses that make classes behave in unintuitive ways. Don't get me wrong, I love using Python and Lisp for my own projects, and I don't like Java very much, but I've come to appreciate its one big advantage for large software systems: it limits the damage that can be done by mediocre programmers.