

Static vs. Dynamic Languages  - edw519
http://notes-on-haskell.blogspot.com/2008/05/static-vs-dynamic-languages.html

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henning
"It's such a good idea, that it's slowly making its way into new programming
languages like Perl 6, Fortress, Factor, Scala, and future versions of C++,
C#, and VB.Net."

C# 3.0 and VB 9.0, which shipped about 5 months ago, have limited local type
inference.

In other words you can type "var x = 5;" or "Dim x = 5" and Visual Studio/the
compiler will know that's an integer. It is not late-bound (the derogatory
term in .NET/Visual Basic for dynamic typing).

That combined with LINQ (including LINQ to XML, which is the easiest way of
doing XML processing I have ever encountered) and closures (which are used to
implement LINQ) puts it way ahead of Java as a language at the moment. There
are obviously issues with .NET as a platform.

