[akeefer]

For what it's worth, the main points of the article are fairly similar to our reasoning behind the Gosu language's design: type inference helps alleviate a lot (not all, but a lot) of the pain of having to write type annotations in languages like Java, and the addition of the ability to do some kinds of metaprogramming at load time (but not at runtime) gives you a lot of the benefits of the sorts of metaprogramming you traditionally do in a dynamic language like Ruby (again, not all, but a lot of the typical use cases).