The co-inventor of Unix, Ken Thompson, and the Unix team engineer and author of The Unix Programming Environment, Rob Pike, are both big advocates of static linking. They designed Go and made a big point of emphasising static linking. Pike: "Shared libraries are obviously a good idea until you've actually used them. Whether it's obvious or not that they're a bad idea is mostly a matter of how close you are to trying to get them to work." He wrote the first windowing system for Unix, which surely qualifies him as a greybeard.