Martin Odersky says on this interview that types can be really annoying for small scripts but for the other case, big systems (real production systems) the refactoring that it allows and the reliability of your code are a fair (or small) price to pay:

They are probably less important when programming in the small. Types can be in a spectrum from incredibly useful to extremely annoying. Typically the annoying parts are type definitions that are redundant, which require you to do a lot of (finger) typing. The useful parts are, of course, when types save you from errors, when types give you useful program documentation, when types act as a safety net for safe refactoring.

I could not agree more, if I'm doing a 50~100 lines script I'm probably not using a full IDE and the Java anonymous inner class full syntax will not be generated by my jEdit (or any other text editor), so a friendly idiom for closures are really a differential.

At the same time I'll not need to maintain this script for months or years, or might never read it again, hence the possibility of powerful automated refactoring (that for instance IntelliJ of Eclipse provide) are not a need, like they are and we already take them for granted on regular systems that we deploy to hundreds/thousands of users.

Automated refactorings are the open gates to the easy and encouraged evolution of software code, and statically declared types are their very foundation.

Cedric talks about why he thinks Ruby will never become mainstream. One of the key points I'd like to highlight is:

The lack of powerful IDE functionalities such as refactoring for Ruby (and Ruby on Rails is much worse off) is still a concern and limits tremendously the pool of developers that Ruby can tap into (see below for some elaboration on this topic).

This collaborates with my thoughts written on this post.

A cool demo about IntelliJ IDEA's Javascript Editor. Don't get me wrong, I think Eclipse is terrific, but IntelliJ was the first IDE to actually revolutionize the industry, and must still by now be the best one. If I had a small company of software development (the dream of so much of us...) I would seriously take into consideration the purchase of it.

I'm suspect to talk about IntelliJ because it was really my first great productive tool, I mean really productive as I had the task to develop in Java. My last frustrated experience at the time was with Borland JBuilder. All those several refactorings, clever shortcuts enhancing navigation and exploration of the source code and static code analysis introduced by IntelliJ were more than a shock to me at the time ;)

Eclipse since then has made a nice work to catch up with IntelliJ. And the fact that IntelliJ remains a commercial tool (not free nor open sourced) and still live and competitive is at least worth to mention (those guys must have made something good ;)

Jetbrains has also a nice blog about it.

Some quick tips on Eclipse (from this screencasts):

A good interview with Thomas Jay Peckish II on Phortran, a set of plugins to develop Fortran apps in Eclipse with strong emphasis on refactoring.

Did you know Visual Age for Java was written initially in Smalltalk?
"Yes. Eclipse is an open-source platform for building IDEs that was originally developed at IBM. It’s a descendant of their VisualAge for Java product. That product was originally written in Smalltalk."

A good definition of Refactoring:
"a refactoring is a “behavior preserving program transformation”."

"Of all the technologies in the program, I believe refactoring has then potential to produce a larger immediate benefit than any of the others"
I could not agree more.

"forward to refactoring Fortran to objects one day not to far in the distant future"
Object Oriented paradigm each time more recognized as a powerful software engineering tool.

Interesting to know a little about Fortran programming language evolution, and Eclipse plugins development. Warning: Not a technical reading at all.

Read on Fowler´s blog/wiki.