Under what circumstances are dynamic languages not appropriate? [closed]

Question

What factors indicate that a project's solution should not be coded in a dynamic language?

Answer 1

Familiarity and willingness of the programmers to work with the language.

Your dynamic language is probably my static language.

Answer 2

System level development is a key group of software that typically shouldn't be in dynamic languages. (drivers, kernel level stuff, etc).

Basically anything that needs to have every ounce of performance or low level hardware access, should be in a lower level language.

Another indicator is if it is highly number crunching, like scientific data number crunching. That is, if it needs to run fast and do number crunching.

I think a common theme is processor intensive problems... in which case you will easily see the performance differences, and you will find that the dynamic language just can't give you the power to use the hardware effectively.

That said, if you are doing processor intensive work and you don't mind the hit in performance, then you could still potentially use a dynamic language.

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Update:

Note that for number crunching, I mean really long running number crunching in scientific arena where the process is running for hours or days... in this case a 2x performance gain is GINORMOUS... if it is on a much smaller scale, then dynamic languages could still be of use.