I'm in the same boat. For most of my career I've worked with dynamically typed languages, but I recently spent a year writing iOS apps with Swift. For me, the b

I'm in the same boat. For most of my career I've worked with dynamically typed languages, but I recently spent a year writing iOS apps with Swift. For me, the biggest win with statically typed languages isn't necessarily catching those obvious bugs (which, as you said, are fairly easy to avoid with discipline), but rather the increased discoverability. I can quickly glance at the type definition for a function/method and generally get an idea of how to use it, whereas the equivalent in dynamic languages usually involves reading documentation or looking at examples. And when this is integrated into your development environment like in the JetBrains products, Xcode, or Visual Studio, it's all seamless in a way that's not really possible with a dynamically typed language. Of course, the other side of it is that statically typed languages tend to be less expressive, which makes things like JSON processing needlessly verbose. So it goes both ways.