I have similar experience. For the most part I agree with you, but types often make reading code a lot easier. I've found that many people tend to encode thei

I have similar experience. For the most part I agree with you, but types often make reading code a lot easier. I've found that many people tend to encode their types into the variable names in languages without type checking. A lot of refactoring tools work more easily with types as well. If you have a method like "write", it's nice to be able to rename it and know 100% for sure that you didn't break something. I'm with you on the excess typing thing, but I still think types are useful just for tool integration. One day I hope that a popular language will emerge that presents an AST so that we can have non-type based refactoring browsers like Smalltalk's.