You get much more than type-checking from ML-style languages. It's worth learning one of these languages well enough to understand the fundamental concepts at

You get much more than type-checking from ML-style languages. It's worth learning one of these languages well enough to understand the fundamental concepts at play. If all you can see is static type analysis and arcane signatures you haven't dug deep enough yet. The renaissance of functional programming happening in JS is the only thing that makes me happy about working in that language. Having immutable.js, ramda, ramda-lens, redux, and various monads (such as data.task and data.maybe) makes my code much more effective than using the majority of JS's more dynamic features... and it doesn't even have static type analysis.