[learc83]

Hacker News is a relatively small site with very few features that is managed by a very small team, and up until a year or so ago often ran rather poorly. I'm not sure it's the best argument for using a dynamically typed language.

That being said, I say use what works for you. Dynamic typing is obviously a viable solution, and there are plenty of successful projects that use use dynamically typed languages.

However, after almost 10 years of using dynamically typed languages I can tell you that I no longer believe the trade-off is worth it. Even on small single person side projects, I personally think that after a thousand lines of code or so, the benefits of static typing outweigh the cost.

[dschiptsov]

The point about this site and Ark is that they (pg and rtm) practice what they preach. It is, basically, a real project based on philosophy from famous "beating an average" essay and the "On Lisp" books - quick, bottom-up process of bootstrapping of a several layers of DSLs (idea popularized by SICP and refined in On Lisp) - with a new dialect of Lisp as a by-product.) Everything in a half of Mb of text.

OK, they reused mzsheme's runtime, because runtime is hard (even clojure delegated everything to JRE) but nevertheless, Arc and this site are remarkably successful examples of real world project with all the benefits of dynamic languages.

Sorry for the delay, we had a quake that day.