"But I do think dynamic scripting languages have their place." My thought isn't actually static/dynamic, but rather the amount of dynamicness. I suspect we cou

"But I do think dynamic scripting languages have their place." My thought isn't actually static/dynamic, but rather the amount of dynamicness. I suspect we could get 99%+ of the benefits of static languages at a fraction of the runtime cost if someone redid a dynamic language from scratch today to be dynamic only in selected ways. You pay a lot of runtime performance in Python to be able to do things like at any time edit a method three levels up the inheritance hierarchy, but you almost never actually do that sort of thing. One idea I cite often is to have a declaration phase versus a runtime phase, because the vast, vast bulk of "dynamicness" is achieved at startup. A JIT could be really aggressive about a lot of optimizations if the language itself guaranteed that after a program (or a module, or a function, or whatever makes sense in the end) declares itself "done being dynamic" that there will be no more changes. In fact I think there's a niche for a high-performance "mostly" dynamic language with threading built in from the beginning in the next 5-10 years. Static languages are getting most of the attention right now, and there's reasons for that, but I think there's a niche here that is not being well explored. Personally I'm having a hard time using dynamically-typed languages right now because the amount of performance I'm throwing away almost makes me nauseous. That's a combination of the problem with being too dynamic, as I said, and multi-decade-old implementations not being able to be multithreaded very easily. I think a language that solved those two things could be very interesting.