Danny Boyd has written an open letter to Microsoft challenging them on the subject of scripting languages. More specifically, he worries about the "need to produce simple, procedural, functional web-based database applications. I'm talking here about HTML forms that post or retrieve data for editing."

Don Box, where I got that link, concurs with the general sentiment and cuts to the quick with the statement "many of us underestimate how big a deal type definitions are...."

What's interesting, of course, is that to those of us who've drunk the Kool-Ade, types (roughly: what object-oriented programming calls a "class") and events seem to make thinking about programs easier. When you think about a variable, don't you think about the values it can have and the ways you can manipulate it? That's its type. It's just that there are a lot of applications where the only two types that are important are integers, strings, and dates. Three important types: integers, strings, dates, and floating point. Four! Four important types: integers, strings, dates, floating point numbers, and currency... Wait, I'll come in again...