The good folks over at Relevance have blogged again, offering something of a backhanded compliment to the new features of C# 3.0:

The argument that I infer from Ted’s piece is "Look! now we can have (some of) the expressiveness of dynamic languages with (most of) the safety of a statically typed language." ... But just because C# now looks a little more like some dynamic languages, don’t make the mistake of assuming that two worlds are converging. In the most important ways, they are as different as ever. Here’s why: Languages like C# "bake in" specific and detailed rules for inheritance, encapsulation, delegation, how symbols are interpreted, etc. In dynamic languages, similar rules exist, but they are not part of the language core. Instead, they are idiomatic extensions built within the language itself. Development teams can follow these idiomatic rules. Or, they can build (and enforce!) their own rules, specifically tailored to their needs. This has huge implications for productivity. In dynamic languages, you get to build the language up toward your domain, while you build the solution down.

Folks, we need to realize something: all this "expressiveness" is like putting craftsman's tools in your hands; in the hands of a master craftsman, amazing things can result, but in anybody else's hands, it's putting a loaded gun into the hands of a child. YOU may be good enough to be disciplined enough to keep the rules of your types in your head when programming with Ruby, but are all of the programmers on your team equally gifted? Are all of the programmers that will follow you so gifted?

There's something else that they call out here, though, and that's the part that irks me:

So why has the static/dynamic debate staggered on for so long? I think we could get closer to some answers with better choice of terms. "Static" vs. "dynamic" is highly misleading. I propose we use a new set of names: vendor-oriented vs. developer-oriented programming, or VOP vs. DOP. So who do you trust most: vendors or developers?