Java.next() - Scala: The Revenge of the Static Typing

Worthwhile article, if only for reading one of the less biased dynamic vs static typing pros an cons.

Interesting article, but I did wonder what he means with this: Duck typing allows to reduce immensely the coupling between your classes<p>Can anybody explain?

What's a well-designed statically-typed language whose syntax resembles more Ruby than Java/C/etc.<p>I'm thinking something like SML. Any others?

This is a good article, but I must take issue with "Static typing allows you to generate the optimum bytecode/binary", simply because whilst you generally get faster binaries, you can't know that it's optimum.<p>Just a nitpick, though.

I don't get the claim that dynamic typing requires more unit tests. Sure if you pass a string to a Python function that expects an int it will blow up at runtime, but is there any value in testing for that?

Can you please give some examples of real world applications in scala?

Scala 2.9 was released as well as Akka 1.1 today.<p>The companies behind have been merged to a new company called Typesafe which offers Training, consulting, support and a tool stack containing Scala, Akka, Eclipse and SBT.<p>The persons behind it read like a who-is-who of the JVM world: <a href="http://typesafe.com/company/team" rel="nofollow">http://typesafe.com/company/team</a>