title: Dynamic typing and programming distributed systems
body: <p>Coming from Scala (and Akka), I recently began looking at other languages that were designed with distributed computing in mind, namely Erlang (and a tiny bit of Oz and Bloom). Both Erlang and Oz are dynamically typed, and if I remember correctly (will try to find link) people have tried to add types to Erlang and managed to type a good portion of it, but could not successfully coerce the system to make it fit the last bit?</p>
  
  <p>Oz, while a research language, is certainly interesting to me, but that is dynamically typed as well.</p>
  
  <p>Bloom's current implementation is in Ruby, and is consequently dynamically typed.</p>
  
  <p>To my knowledge, Scala (and I suppose Haskell, though I believe that was built initially more as an exploration into pure lazy functional languages as opposed to distributed systems) is the only language that is statically typed and offer language-level abstractions (for lack of a better term) in distributed computing.</p>
  
  <p>I am just wondering if there are inherent advantages of dynamic typing over static typing, <strong>specifically in the context of providing language level abstractions for programming distributed systems.</strong></p>