I have the same reactions to his talks. Yet, long term, I've never been able to convince myself that clojure, common lisp or more popular ruby/python, are good

I have the same reactions to his talks. Yet, long term, I've never been able to convince myself that clojure, common lisp or more popular ruby/python, are good choices for me in case of long running projects. I'm not sure how being liberal in what you accept is at odds with static typing. Static typing is about encoding the rules and shapes of the data that your program *knows* how to work on. It's not preventing some other data that you don't care from existing alongside. Even if I'm missing something, that doesn't change the fact that in most static typed languages you can fallback to some sort of "any" types. Seems to me it's better to have option to use static or dynamic types in the same program, instead of being forced to do *everything* in dynamically typed way.