On Jun 15, 2007, at 7:04 AM, Bill Man wrote:

> Hello,
>
> The concept of Dynamically Typed Languages has peaked my interest.
> However, I have spent sometime trying to find what problem they  
> exactly
> solve.  Can anyone tell me:
>
> - What problems do dynamically typed languages such as Ruby solve?
> - What is the business proposition for using a dynamic language  
> such as
> Ruby over Java / C#?
> - What kinds of things can be better with dynamic languages such as
> Ruby?
>
> Thank you so much for your help.  I have been searching the web for a
> while and I haven't been able to find anything.
>
> -- 
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
>
Dynamic typing itself is not such a big deal, but it does mean less  
keyboarding, more concise code that is generally more readable.
Dynamic typing allows more duck typing and introspection.
You can try to send a message to an object. If it can do it, it will  
try.
But you can actually ask the object if it can do something before  
doing it.
Objective-C can also do this because it's got a bit of a runtime
But also, you get (sometimes arbitrary) language rules that can be  
useful.
In practice, it just makes some things more convenient with automagic  
type conversions.
puts 5
will actually convert the Fixnum 5 to a string for you.