It all relates to a paradigm I and my first mentor skirmished over a bit. He was old school and in to sucking every bit of processing out of a single command as possible. I, being much less experienced, would write code that was a bit more human readable but also less direct, less elegant. To be sure, I greatly admire elegant code and strive for it myself but I also recognize that processors have a little overhead when it comes to dealing with most tasks so why not use it?

Bringing it all around then, the essay deals with how dynamic languages are becoming competitive with static typed languages when considering the application as a whole. Improvements in hardware, compilers, and runtime engines plus smaller code bases and quicker prototyping make dynamic languages attractive.

Of course, he’s pushing for Lisp while I’m pretty happy with Python.