Yeah, no. IDEs are tools. There are great dynamic IDEs and great statically typed IDEs, and some are great at both (IntelliJ). That being said, I have a theo

Yeah, no. IDEs are tools. There are great dynamic IDEs and great statically typed IDEs, and some are great at both (IntelliJ). That being said, I have a theory along these lines. I wrote a song about it. Want to hear it? Here it go: Dynamic languages are so hard to deal with that libraries with complicated external APIs die quickly. This ends up exerting a hell of a darwinian pressure on them, where the libraries that survive are complete-enough-to-be-useful but have very tight external APIs. The statically typed languages, with their naval-helicopter-whop-whop-whop-ing IDEs armed to the hilt with code completion, navigation, code-gen and thermo-nuclear refactoring tools, do not put nearly as much pressure on the API designer to keep the external interface tight, and thus you get the baroque J2EE-style sh*t shows. So, while I don't view IDEs as a language smell, I do think that they have, indirectly, contributed to the observable sanity-gap between the libraries for dynamic and static languages.