It's amusing that the first language with great refactoring tools had dynamic types (Smalltalk). But I think it's an underappreciated note that static type lang

It's amusing that the first language with great refactoring tools had dynamic types (Smalltalk). But I think it's an underappreciated note that static type languages often create a bias for earlier coupling, less system-independent modularity, and a lot of unnecessary data copying from structure to structure, creating in turn a stronger need for refactoring tools since what should be small changes end up becoming larger ones affecting more places. Even though they can't catch everything (thanks to reflection) I'm pretty happy that such tools exist when doing Java development. I've sometimes missed them in less tooling-mature dynamic langs, but also have found them less necessary. (Though I'm sure part of that is due to other feature-factors, like closures, that historically have been a long time coming (if ever) to the most popular static langs.)