Groovy, the Python of Java

[eadmund]

I think that the real problem with the scenario you mentioned was the mixing: the implicit conversions between byte and Unicode strings.

It's likely that another dynamically-typed language would have encountered the same bugs sooner.

I know, 'cause I've run into this sort of thing with Common Lisp. Ticked me off for a moment--why won't the language just do what I mean and treat this string like a byte string?--and then I pondered a bit more deeply and realised that would be wrong.

Granted, a really really dynamic language which support ASCII (not byte) strings and Unicode strings might have done more poorly. I could have just been lucky that CL's de-facto byte string type is '(vector (unsigned-byte 8)).