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    Both restrictive languages and non-restrictive languages have their high and low points, I suppose. However in my experience, having more degrees of freedom is like programming in assembly in that you can do everything, but it is difficult to do any complex programs. Nice answer.
    – Neil
    CommentedDec 17, 2013 at 11:24
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    The word you're looking for is static typing. Statically typed languages can be strict or lax, they can be strong or weak, they can be mandatory or optional, and they can be explicit or implicit, but what they all have in common is that types are facts that can be deduced from the text of the program without actually running it. "Dynamic" languages are so called because facts about the program can sometimes not be known until the program is actually running.
    – Eric Lippert
    CommentedDec 17, 2013 at 15:49
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    I'd like to add that there is a hell of a difference between the types in Java (which allow easy and dangerous cast-to-Object violations of the type system) and Haskell (which requires on average one explicit type signature per five or six functions, the rest is inferred, but will spank you if you try anything funny).
    – Kile Kasmir Asmussen
    CommentedDec 17, 2013 at 16:10
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    "Others think that this restricts their creative expressivity, slows down development ..." -- I would add "introduces artificial complexity into the design" to the list. Two strong examples of different kinds of complexity that a "static typed" language can force you to cope with is (a) monads as present in Haskell; and (b) Peter Norvig showing that 16 of 23 patterns of the design patterns of that popular book are "invisible" or simpler in "dynamic typed" languages whereas in other languages they are mostly bloat working around static checking limitations: norvig.com/design-patterns
    – Thiago Silva
    CommentedDec 17, 2013 at 16:24
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    @ThiagoSilva: Monads are not an example of complexity per se. Many people find them hard to learn, but as abstractions go they are quite simple--the difficulty is that they are also quite abstract. In fact, monads often simplify a design by making it more explicit: they just highlight things which are magical and unacknowledged in other languages. And Norvig's design-pattern article is not relevant to statically typed functional languages at all; it's not a comment about static typing in general but rather about Java-style type systems (which we can all agree are a mess).
    – Tikhon Jelvis
    CommentedJan 27, 2014 at 21:51

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