I've worked with C++, assembly, PHP, Ruby, Javascript, MATLAB, Scheme, SQL.. the list goes on. Honestly when it's all said and done, static typing is very low

I've worked with C++, assembly, PHP, Ruby, Javascript, MATLAB, Scheme, SQL.. the list goes on. Honestly when it's all said and done, static typing is very low on my list of worries. Type hinting and contracts and all that stuff is nice, but the main problems in most real-world, large-scale projects are: * mutability * object-oriented business logic (rather than functional/declarative) * friction * build systems * async * drowning in inconsistencies Some languages like Ruby have conceptual errors - for example its try/catch mechanism (rescue) defaults to using StandardError instead of the base Exception class. Which means that even though it implemented one-liners like: load 'my_file.txt' rescue puts 'file not found!' In practice these are rarely used because they may throw LoadError (which is lower in the class hierarchy than StandardError so is not caught by rescue, and we can't say rescue Exception puts 'file not found!') so the script crashes. Each time I look deeper into Ruby, I find more and more of these idiosyncrasies that don't build from first principles, so I can't tell what problems they're trying to solve (some of its errata seems to have been inherited from Perl). So I would advise against using Ruby for new development until it has a sister language like Hack that attempts to solve these longstanding inconsistencies and move Ruby forward. In contrast, PHP has implementation errors where some methods in its standard libraries are camel case and some are snake case, or they decided to use backslash when declaring namespaces. Since these decisions have no bearing on business logic, I can largely overlook them. When people say that PHP is a fractal of bad design, I tend to agree, but do NOT agree that it's a fractal of bad engineering. In fact PHP is by far the most productive language I've ever used (at least an order of magnitude more than the next closes contender, say Javascript in Node). The only language that comes close is MATLAB, which comes from a completely different paradigm of matrix operations so simply provides more leverage per line of code. Static typing mainly becomes important when you're working with other developers, or have large/legacy codebases. If we're strictly talking about our ability to write business logic as effortlessly as possible, then the conceptual problems I've illustrated above (which pop up repeatedly across frameworks/languages) have much higher priority IMHO. Also on a personal note, I find that dynamic types tend towards rapid application development (RAD) because I often work at a high/abstract level. I find that the friction of assigning types steals brainpower from the task at hand - generally composing logical units that pass around hierarchical data like JSON or tabular data like CSV. If we stick to RAD, then building out strictly-typed/over-architected class hierarchies is generally a waste of time and expensive to maintain.