How do you program differently in dynamic languages?

Question

How would someone who really knows how to take advantage of dynamic programming languages approach programming differently than someone working in a static language?

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Answer 1

For me it's turnaround speed. The dynamic languages I use (Python and a bit of JavaScript at the moment) are interpreted. This means I can try things out on the fly. If I want to see how a certain bit of the API behaves I can just hack away at the interpreter for a couple of minutes.

If I wanted to do the same in a language like C# I'd have to fire up VS, make a project, then compile it. If I want to test a part of a bigger piece of software I'm working on I probably have to compile that, which can take ages. Fortunately in .Net I can load up assemblies from the big project in IronPython and get some of the same benefits (i.e. quickly testing out different parts of the API) of interpreted languages.