Gosling has a post about some comments he made regarding scripting languages, dynamic languages and static languages. I’ve read the post but haven’t gotten to root of what he said originally. The big concern I have is that I just don’t get a lot of the arguments about declarations of variables. Unless the language is during 100% dynamic lookup of methods and variables and the classes are always open for business (i.e. open for editing), I just don’t see what declaring a variable like this buys anyone:

f = new ArrayList();

I personally don’t mind type a few extra characters. This isn’t the savings that scripting and dynamic languages buy you. Anyone who says otherwise I think is either smokin’ something or just hasn’t though through it all yet.