This is, to me, a really poignant post. I think there's a level of civility that sometimes can be lacking in our daily lives as engineers, and markcc does a good service by writing well about it.
The inability to distinguish static/dynamic strong/weak isn't a minor mistake like fluffing up some grammar, it betrays serious ignorance of the subject material.
He's very opinionated and doesn't seem to know the subject material very well. He's just expressing his opinion slightly more loudly and eruditely than others.
I don't think he's confused about the distinction between them. There's one sentence in the beginning where he probably meant "dynamically typed" rather than "weakly typed", but for the rest of his post, his terms are chosen correctly. I'd rather give him the benefit of the doubt, than dismiss his opinion because of what might just have been a typo.
That's because, as engineers, we believe there is one true answer to everythingTM. Since there is one true answer, there is no room for shades of gray. This is one of the things I've noticed most changes as engineers age: the world becomes less black and white and much more full of color.
I don't miss the "I know he right answer" egotism I had in my 20s!
Still, exist a one true answer to everything. The problem is that truly understanding the question and work toward the correct answer is far harder than anyone can anticipate, for any kind of above-to-super-easy task you can imagine.
I dislike the "shades of gray/full colors" vs "black & white" thing, because IMHO, create the idea that exist several competing and contradictory correct answers to things. I tough still exist one puer solution, but several * approximations* that, because our limitations and/or limitations in the tools we use look like different (in computers, the final solution is expressed in assembler/bits. Languages are a illusion!).
But at the end, and with the age, I think is become clear that some questions beg for a better answers, but suck to solve it with our current approach. And I for example, all the time, working with python, obj-c, sql, delphi/pascal, javascript, coffescript, foxpro, html have the constant grief of "What if, I could to do this, instead of what I must do, because I can't with this tool!"
However, I firmly think is super-important to use several, opposite languages, to truly discover better ways to do things, learn more effective, faster, expressive or whatever approach to a solution, and broad the selection of tools to solve a problem. For example, when I use c# or obj-c, I tend to look the solution in python (my personal experience have taught me that python folks have the super-easy-to-understand solution to anything). I'm gratefull to have learned first foxpro. Is my secret sauce to be better with sql databases. I kill to have linq in other languages. How I wish to have learned haskell before. How I hate the verbosity of anything except python. Why python have null exceptions? And so on.
Is not, I think, the true realization of many, claimed to be: "shades of gray" but instead: Look, understand the life, universe and everything else become simpler when we have telescope, microscope, radioscope, math, physic, art, music, literature, science fiction, the other boring but useful science...........
