Another way of thinking about the difference between dynamic and static languages is how they express interfaces. For example, Java interfaces define a group of method signatures that a class must implement. There is no way of enforcing that different subclass implementations do roughly the same thing – its down to convention and good style.

A dynamic language such as Ruby or Smalltalk doesn’t have the concept of interfaces. Instead, each method signature could be considered as implicitly defining its own interface – an interface containing just that one method. When calling a method on an object, the object’s type is essentially irrelevant. All that matters is that it has a method whose signature matches the one you’re trying to call.