I take objection with the article regarding "Pretending that syntactic overhead is the issue". Or rather, I would say it's an incomplete way of looking at it. N

I take objection with the article regarding "Pretending that syntactic overhead is the issue". Or rather, I would say it's an incomplete way of looking at it. Non-statically typed languages (I'm thinking reasonably full-featured languages like Perl, Python or Ruby, not Bash) are, IMHO, go-to languages for certain tasks because they allow you to get results quickly. How? * Less typing (there is freedom in being able to cobble together a reasonably complex program in a single file of a few hundred lines in an editor, vs a number of files and thousands of lines in a IDE). * Advanced features! It is only now that closures, first-class functions, etc, start to trickle down to mainstream, statically typed languages. And they do make for shorter programs (see, eg, the post on expired links on HN). Of course, it's not to say that non-statically typed programs don't suffer from a number of drawbacks, but dismissing conciseness as something trivial does not, I think, accurately reflect reasons for why people use this kind of language.