And Amazon API Gateway, potentially the request routing layer for a heterogenous set of Lamdba-backed endpoints. Seems like that may have been particularly a service jenkstom was referring to. https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/
> I do think that some strongly typed languages make it too difficult to step outside the type system; in Scala I have to do something like (x.asInstanceOf[{def foo(): String}]).foo() whereas in Python I can just write x.foo()
Have to make an explicit cast with a structural type? Surely you can do better, like, say, a trait.
> I'm talking about casting, calling a method that the type system doesn't know is present.
I think a larger example is necessary to see how you ended up in such a situation, but I suppose it's off-topic...
I believe the point of the article is largely to raise questions and discussion about a couple of things:
1. Potential disruptive impact of alternative currencies with respect to transaction fees -- people want easy ways to exchange money, for commercial or personal reasons, that aren't cost-prohibitive. Can alternative currencies present a legitimate challenge to traditional payment providers in this arena? Can traditional providers learn from it by finding (sustainable) ways to better serve consumer/merchant demands?
2. Whether payment providers, of any kind, can profit and compete on consumer behavior data as an offset to higher transaction fees, and how much consumers are willing to tolerate it. We haven't seen this play out yet for Bitcoin and its ilk. jusben1369 pointed out LevelUp here.
The article does not propose a conclusion that Bitcoin is appropriate for your Aunt Judy today. That's probably been beaten to death by coverage all over.
FWIW I believe "Maybe you don't care about Erlang's syntax or static typing" was referring to his earlier mention of Go as statically typed. A comma would have improved the clarity :-)