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What is the appeal of dynamically-typed languages?

Kris Nuttycombe asks:

I genuinely wish I understood the appeal of unityped languages better. Can someone who really knows both well-typed and unityped explain?

I think the terms well-typed and unityped are a bit of question-begging here (you might as well say good-typed versus bad-typed), so instead I will say statically-typed and dynamically-typed.

I'm going to approach this article using Scala to stand-in for static typing and Python for dynamic typing. I feel like I am credibly proficient both languages: I don't currently write a lot of Python, but I still have affection for the language, and have probably written hundreds of thousands of lines of Python code over the years.

jboner

Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012)
----------------------------------
L1 cache reference                           0.5 ns
Branch mispredict                            5   ns
L2 cache reference                           7   ns                      14x L1 cache
Mutex lock/unlock                           25   ns
Main memory reference                      100   ns                      20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy             3,000   ns        3 us
Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network       10,000   ns       10 us
Read 4K randomly from SSD*             150,000   ns      150 us          ~1GB/sec SSD

aemkei

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