And how dynamically disadvantaged is Perl, really?

(These are my Perl-specific responses to Tim Bray’s Ruby-inspired thoughts on some advantages of static typing, as opposed to my general responses.)

First, I want to mention that even Perl 5, the most grimly resistent language when it comes to reasoning about a given piece of source code, has people working on machine processing and looking to build smarter IDEs.

Secondly, I want to point out that Perl 6 has:

• Old-fashioned function/method signatures which include optional type declarations. These may, if present, either be enforced or merely used as hints by the compiler, at the programmer’s discretion.

• Many constructs that are inherently parallelisable, such as junctions and hyper operators. That allows parallelising bytecode at the VM level, even if it comes from source code that was never explicitly written to thread.

In light of these facts, how much is left of the points Tim argues?