[iainmerrick]

Hmm, I’m not sure you’re right about the historical trends. As I see it, the static typing battle has been going on forever. Each style has been popular in certain areas but neither has ever been completely dominant.

Javascript, Python and Ruby are the big dynamic languages today. But you can go back as far as you like, to when languages like Perl, TCL, Lisp and BASIC were big. There have always been dynamic languages.

Static languages have gotten more robustly type-safe over time (even today’s C is much safer than K&R C). But apart from that shift, it seems to me that the static vs dynamic landscape has been much the same for decades.

[rsclient]

I'm not sure why you're including BASIC in with the dynamic languages -- in its classic microcomputer form, it's pretty well limited to int or float, and string, and arrays of those things. When you make a variable, you always define it's type (A is a double, but A$ is a string).

Some versions are a little bit richer in that you can have both ints AND doubles (woot, woot!).