[armitron]

The article explains (very well) what the benefits of dynamic typing are, it's just that Python is a terrible language that spits in the face of Alan Kay's ideas. It's like someone went out of their way to create a language that would not be too paradigm shifting by discarding the crucial elements that Alan Kay keeps raving about and only choosing the most superficial with the only consideration being ease of use and popular appeal.

Try programming in Erlang, Common Lisp or Smalltalk. All dynamically typed languages. All meshing perfectly with Alan Kay's vision. All very different to Python. It's too bad that people's idea of "dynamic typing" has been - mostly - reduced down to Python and Javascript.

[0x445442]

I wouldn't say current Smalltalk implementations mesh perfectly with Kay's vision. It's focus on class hierarchies and inheritance breaks with what Kay's initial vision was. That said, it's possible to write Smalltalk code favoring composition over inheritance or in a much more functional way that focuses on messages.