It shouldn't be an excuse to dispense with testing altogether, but static typing is certainly superior to testing for certain classes of bug. The compile-time c

It shouldn't be an excuse to dispense with testing altogether, but static typing is certainly superior to testing for certain classes of bug. The compile-time checks prove certain types of defect simply don't exist, which is the kind of guarantee no amount of testing can give you in that respect for any useful program. As for the initialisation problem, it's true that it can't be structs all the way down, and at some point you will have to create one of these objects, probably from a primitive with a non-meaningful type such as int, or string. But my experience is that IDs and the like tend to be created in a small number of places, and then reused, copied and passed around. Far easier to find and check all the places where one is created than all the places where one is used!