[alexknvl]

That's the thing. There is no argument for one vs the other.

There is a statement of the following fact: "It is hard to express heterogeneous array type in most statically typed programming languages and verify operations at compile time." Well, duh. AFAIK this would require dependent types* (not something that you get for granted in mainstream languages).

But can we check types in runtime? Yes. Does it mean that it can only be done in a dynamic language? No. It can be easily done in any language that has integers and arrays. Even x86 assembly is enough.

* Scala's type system should be enough, if we use shapeless.HList's for column and row types and then a ton of implicits to resolve the resulting type and check that everything is sound.