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Static languages have some advantages. It's not quite the same thing (Perl being dynamic and all) but I have gone towards Moose in Perl which gives some of the things I see as advantages of static languages (such as the ability to engineer in constraints declaratively, assuming those are enforced by the language. SQL is great this way.)

The real reason to use languages like C and C++ is performance. The reason for dynamic languages is rapid prototyping. Java is somewhere in the middle but not really ideal except for where you want to compile your software to run on an imaginary CPU which can be emulated everywhere :-)



I'm not saying they don't have their advantages. I want to be clear about that. But for most web apps, the limitations probably outnumber the benefits. Especially since the stateless nature of most web apps allow for easy horizontal scaling, thus negating the performance advantage.

As for performance, it really is amazing how fast node.js is. It's like a slow static language rather than a fast dynamic language (by that I mean, the gap between it and Java is smaller than the gab between it and Python). I don't know why that is, but I hope every dynamic language has that potential and that someone manages to unlock it.




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