Colin Putney on typing

Colin Putney has an interesting take on static/dynamic types, and would like to see the dynamic community and the functional community cooperate. This is an interesting analogy:

Dynamic folks like to take a gardening approach to programming. They're up to their knees in the mud, hands dirty, planting and pruning, swatting bugs as they appear and composting weeds for fertilizer. They view the system as a living, evolving thing, and value testing, feedback and iterative development for figuring out what works and what doesn't. They don't worry about ensuring that everything goes right from the beginning, because a little pruning or landscaping can fix any problems that come up.

Static folks, on the other hand, take the architecture approach. They sit at a drafing table, and design structures of concrete and steel. They view the products of their work as monuments which must withstand the pressures of time and work hard to imbue them with mathematical grace and harmony. They know that structural failures can be catastrophic, so they build safety into their designs from the beginning.

Not a perfect analogy, but it gets his idea across.