Static vs. Dynamic Languages

I'm shocked this talk exists in 2013. I feel like I was thrown back to the late 90's when dynamic languages were getting popular. One slide puts "more risky?" under Dynamic languages. Seriously? Google uses Python. Visual Basic is a core component in MS products. Rails is massively popular and ran Twitter's frontend for a long time. This talk is just a ridiculous waste of time. Also, if one plans on comparing dynamic and static languages in the future, please have a better static language to compare than Java.

I am yet to see the video, but this is the way the enterprise world works.

On the off-shoring Fortune 500 projects I take part on, I would always advise against dynamic languages.

Usually they have teams of 60+ developers, many of each just out of university to keep costs down and very seldom write unit tests. When they do, it is as if they did not, because when reviewing them, they actually don't test anything.

I doubt any of those developers would be able to produce proper running code in dynamic languages.

Having watch the video now, I agree with Fake Fake's comment:

Also, if one plans on comparing dynamic and static languages in the future, please have a better static language to compare than Java.

Everything he says from 23:30 (Sheet 38) on, he confuses "dynamic vs. static" languages with "functional vs. non-functional paradigm languages".
Where "functional" simply means: Functions are first class.

Saying that Dictionaries from key to function or functions returning functions is a specificum of dynamic languages is a terrible ignorance about Haskell. Well, and Scala, Ceylon, Kotlin btw.

Beside that, this part of his talk is going to outdate very quickly once Java 8 gets lambdas.
I don't say that this makes Java a Functional language, it only shows that this kind of expressivity he mentions has nothing to do with static vs. dynamic!

At a given moment I started to wonder if Java is the only static language he really knows, although he also briefly mentions C, or he wanted to pass a PR message about dynamic languages to an audience of developers with Java only experience.

Much of the IT world is still back in the late 90's, and traditional (not newer) "static languages" have most of the market. "Rails is massively popular"? I wish the numbers agreed with you, but they don't, not yet. The numbers say that Java and C are massively popular, each 10 times more popular than Ruby.

Many decision makers in the industry do still think dynamic languages are risky - so I named it. I wasn't preaching to the choir, which I gather you're in.

Your critique of my use of Java as indicative of modern static languages is bang-on. My recent expertise is limited to Java and Python, and my critiques of Java don't apply across the board to many other static languages, not even to older ones like C or C++! That's a helpful correction, thanks!

The static vs dynamic question is a profound one, one cannot save the effort of learning at least
one or two modern static language to discuss the topic. I would recommend giving a serious try at Scala and Typescript,
and then do a follow up presentation !