> Want an easy concrete example? You and your cofounder have 10 years of Ruby experience and investors/customers who want a product yesterday. Or the deliverable that makes most sense is a PHP script that users can drag into CPanel because that's your customer base.

True but facile. Sure, for every imaginable technology, there is a conceivable scenario in which that technology is the right choice. Doesn't mean there's no such thing as a good or bad technology.

> The tinkerer inside you always wants to try new things and convince you that some greener tech on the other side of the fence are going to make the difference. It's usually just procrastination from the actual hard stuff: building things people want, today.

That's actually an argument for being more absolutist about the technical side: you're unlikely to be in the obscure circumstances where a dynamic language would actually be helpful, and even more unlikely to have that be more important than your business decision. So rather than carefully considering your circumstances and weighing up the tradeoffs, it's better to follow the consensus for what's a good general-purpose language (which these days means a statically typed language) and get on with building your business.

> It's not any better if business trade-offs make another decision better.

I'm sorry, but cleaning your windows with Windex instead of tap water is then "not any better if business trade-offs make tap water better". I am just not sure what you are arguing for: Static typing is better, except for when you don't have static typing?

Some folks here are in the position to choose their current, or shape a collective future landscape, and for those static typing is a consideration.

You mention PHP a few times, but I think this is actually a good example for something that has been pushed away in favor of better things. My impression is that at least the bigger software corporations have moved away from PHP if they ever used it to begin with. Even Facebook, one of PHP's biggest users, replaced it with their own so-named "Hack" eventually, which is apparently a PHP-derivate with "both dynamic typing and static typing" according to Wikipedia.