[hvidgaard]

You can absolutely write in a functional style. It does not have to be the enterprise OOP monsters of the past. Apart from something radical such as adapting a Hindley-Milner type system, I'm not sure it can support functions much better than it already is.

I think most people simple oppose to the idea of a static type system, and my experience is that static type checking is an absolute time saver in the long run for large long lived. Significantly.