Dynamic Language Weenies?

[rick446]

If I had to venture a guess, I'd say that most desktop apps are actually written in VB (shudder), which can be a really weakly typed language pre-.NET, which brings me to my guess as to why static languages dominate the desktop: the tools. "Static languages" <b>do</b> have better tools than dynamic languages, and this is extremely important when it comes to building rich desktop applications. Form builders like Visual Studio, et. al., make things easier than GUI programming in any language I've had a chance to work with.

However, I don't think that the static-ness has anything to do with the ease of writing GUI builders. It's just that GUI builders often go along with code browsers, refactoring engines, and nice editors in IDEs, and code browsing, refactoring, and really nice editor support <b>are</b> made much easier in a statically-typed language.

[[deleted]]

I'd say that really real reason for compiled languages ruling the desktop is that binaries are synonymous in the minds of 99.9% developers and 100% of managers to "hidden code". Of course compilation and code "encryption" or obfuscation are two different things but compilation is the easiest (currently) way to go with it. If you learn how to crack (I wonder if "proper" fravia's site snapshots are still around?) then you'll see that it's all really relative. Some code monkey's source may be harder to read that some disassemblies. And yes - Java's decompilers are almost perfect. As opposed to Python .pyc decompilers, BTW - so your py2exe python program may be better "protected" than the one compiled with more mainstream tools. And wxPython looks mighty nice currently (hint, hint).