[fghgfdfg]

I've never understood what people actually mean when they say things like "dynamic languages let you express yourself more easily."

I tend to find it significantly harder in dynamic languages. Yeah, there is way more flexibility in small decisions (like right now, is it easier to return a string or an integer or whatever) but it's not free. Your little decision interacts, directly or otherwise, with potentially the entire rest of the program that might ever exist. There is probably a best choice, and it's hard not to try to find it every single time. Doing the easiest thing right now might mean you need to go and adjust many other things. In order to know what is overall easier you need to keep the rest of the program in mind.

I find dynamic languages kind of exhausting to write anything but one-off scripts in. I can't make good choices without holding far more of the program in my head than I would in a static language. Sometimes I don't even realize I'm making such a decision because I don't have a correct or full view of the rest of the program. To make matters worse those errors won't even show up as being a problem at the decision-site.

I feel like I express myself much easier in a language with a strong static type system. I can write down clearly exactly what the model is, and then the compiler or types let me know when I try to stray from it. From there I can decide if it's better to adjust what I'm doing in the small or the large.

[goatlover]

Because languages like Lisp, Smalltalk, Ruby give you greater control over bending the language to more closely match the problem domain, instead of jumping through extra hoops to express what's needed, and the result is a more readable program, because it's expressed in terms of what the program's trying to accomplish.

The entire history of computing is abstraction away from the machine, and offloading as much of the work to the machine, so that humans can focus on solving problems instead of worrying about lower level details. Dynamic languages tend to be better at that.

Now if you Haskell is the comparison, then maybe not. But Haskell has an advanced type system with excellent composability, so it's quite capable of expressing high level abstractions and domain specific code.

That's the general idea, but clearly not everyone agrees. Or perhaps, other concerns are considered more important.