> they may not have even existed if they were written in staticly typed languages

This is pure speculation. There's no way you can back this up with any sort of real data.

The inverse isn't true either. StackOverflow was written in C#, and it's been doing perfectly well.

I've addressed another commentor making a similar presumption as you, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37312297

The only thing I'll concede is that using a statically-typed language without a good type inference system, might slow people down a tiny bit.

The serious downsides of dynamic typing means you might still win out (in terms of developer productivity, code readability, code reliability, and ease of debugging) even if you use a language like Java instead of PHP.

Stack overflow is miniscule compared to Twitter or Facebook. You can just book at Basecamp if you want to pick a smaller company. They are Ruby on Rails and they have been consistently doing well.

Ultimately billion dollar companies have been built on dynamic languages. There is nothing stopping you from succeeding with dynamic languages. There just isn't. There are tradeoffs and these companies made them.

I agree that there isn't much necessarily stopping a person succeeding due to the choice of language (unless it's some esoteric or otherwise unrealistic language).

Yahoo used C++ for instance (it would not be my choice, even though it's weakly statically-typed).

But, yea, like you said--there are tradeoffs.

I think dynamically-typed languages has the allure of letting you build quickly initially, but the downsides of dynamic typing start hitting pretty soon afterwrd.

I write a lot of small scripts in Python. It certainly is easier to throw something quickly together, especially when the data model is amorphous, with dynamic typing. But that doesn't mean I'd use Python for a large project.