Refactoring's a different ballgame, where the cost of static typing has already been paid and the benefit is larger (primarily because the risk of type errors o

Refactoring's a different ballgame, where the cost of static typing has already been paid and the benefit is larger (primarily because the risk of type errors otherwise is much higher than with new code). Since most code spends far more of its lifecycle being modified than being written in the first place, that makes the case for static typing much stronger, but I still share the OP's skepticism about static-typing advocates' claims.