I've shared Yegge's disdain for static typing for quite some time. One of the best examples of how awful it can be is type hinting (optional type constraints on

I've shared Yegge's disdain for static typing for quite some time. One of the best examples of how awful it can be is type hinting (optional type constraints on parameters) in PHP. Many times I've explained to people why type hints are awful thing deserving banishment to hell — along with Facebook suggestions and Microsoft product recommendations — but so many PHP programmers seem to love them! Now that I read this I can see why that sort of thinking is bound to exist for a language like PHP (read: noobs). Recently, however, I've been getting into Haskell and in doing so I found my opinion on static typing left a little beaten in the legs and suffering some obvious facial wounds. Static typing works in Haskell, I'm pretty sure of that. The question I'm left with is, why? I think it might have something to do with the fact that type checks in class-based OO languages don't even begin to insure the program correctness that novices are often foolish enough to think they do. Everyone else recognizes the need for all manner of testing, and that's how correctness is proved (albeit, approximately) in imperative languages. In Haskell, I've found that type checks go quite some way to proving correctness, no really! (They don't actually prove correctness but proofs of correctness would be impossible without them). Without even bothering to do any proofs or testing you get a much more rigorous check for correctness in Haskell than you do when a Java program successfully compiles. I can't emphasize this difference enough. To me static typing in Java is an annoyance and a lie. And so when I program in a language that teeters between static and dynamic typing, such as PHP, I go out of my way to write libraries that make things more dynamic (I've got one GitHub) and I call men who advocate aforementioned type hinting, girls names. In Haskell, it's totally different; it actually works; it's actually useful. Not to mention the clever stuff that you can do with types which I couldn't begin to do justice here given my inexperience.