[weavejester]

I was being glib, so let me expand on what I said a little.

By 'constraint' I mean something the language disallows or at least discourages. Constraints in software development are generally intended to eliminate certain classes of errors. Static typing, immutability, variable scoping, automatic memory management and encapsulation are all examples of constraints, and represent control that the language takes away from the developer (or at least hides behind 'unsafe' APIs).

By 'expressiveness' I mean a rough measurement of how concisely a language can implement functionality. I'm not talking code golf here; I mean more the size of the AST than the actual number of bytes in the source files.

Adding constraints to a language does not necessarily reduce its overall expressiveness, but static typing is one of those constraints that typically does have a negative effect on language expressiveness. Some will argue that static typing is worth it regardless, or that this isn't an inherent problem with static typing, but one that stems from inadequate compilers.

[owlstuffing]

That is a pretty fair assessment, and I'll avoid the nominal v. structural subject, but in my experience the difference between static and dynamic typing comes down to metaprogramming. For instance, much of Python's success stems from its dynamic metaprogramming capabilities. By contrast Java's limitations wrt metaprogramming prevent it from competing in areas such as ML and data science / analytics.

One of the most untapped and misunderstood areas in language design is static metaprogramming. Perhaps this is what you meant by "inadequate compilers", but there is no reason why Java can't provide compile-time metaprogramming. With a comprehensive implementation it can compete directly with dynamic metaprogramming, with the benefits of static analysis etc., which is a game changer.

[OptionOfT]

Reading your previous comments made me read 'glib' as 'g-lib', the GTK one.