The interpreted language trap

This is a small rant about programming languages.

Scripting languages are quite popular these days, and for a reason : changes you make to the source are reflected instantly, speeding up the development process; and thanks to Moore's law the performance hit does not matter as much as it used to.

But, it's a trap! The reason those should be avoided is because of code rot.
As the runtime depends on loading order, previous instructions, etc.; IDEs cannot reliably determine the type of an object or lookup references to it - unless, precisely, you are debugging..
IDEs (all I know of) cannot refactor reliably scripts.

It means that any change that will be made must be tested and validated under real-usage conditions, which makes people reluctant to make cosmetic changes : variable renaming, unused function removal, ...

So generations of programmers come and go. Codebase grows but never shrinks. Up to the point it becomes unusable and has to be rewritten/replaced! It is like a garden : unattended for too long, it cannot return to the pretty lawn state.
I have experience this several times with different scripting languages : PHP,  bash,  javascript, JSP EL, python... it all ends the same way. Even worse if the script does not output to the programmer but to the user, because there is a chance the programmer will never know what went wrong and since when.

So, if you happen to program and read this, do yourself (or your sucessors) a favour, and stay away from languages which sources you cannot easily refactor!