The father of Java, James Gosling, is traveling the down under and has some.. erhm.. “interesting” thoughts on scripting languages. I’m getting these sound bytes from Alan Fracis’ summary of the Sidney meeting, so there is a chance they might not be accurate, but here they are:

Opinion of script languages – Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP
Program density and comprehensibility are inversely related
Write Once, Read Never. TECO was worse. Rapid Development
static typing gets you to prod faster, scripting gets you
to demo first. easy to write small things, harder to wrote
big things.

Oy. First of all, lumping all these dynamic languages together under the convenient banner of “scripting” to attack them in symphony is disingenuous in itself. But claiming that writing a long program leads to a more comprehensible one is just plain silly. I hope that wasn’t what he meant.

Additionally, the artificial distinction between “demo” and “prod” in a post-agile world rings awfully hollow in that High Priest of Architecture kind-of-way. Once more oy.