I think the happy medium is a dynamically typed language that gives you the option to type or at least have a way to check typing. Java isn't really statically

I think the happy medium is a dynamically typed language that gives you the option to type or at least have a way to check typing. Java isn't really statically typed at all since it is necessary to cast in daily usage. Truly statically typed languages seem really cool but you don't see a lot of major things being done with them due to the overhead. I have found too that when you are programming functionally as in Clojure you don't get bit by shared state things not being what you expected as everything you are writing should be data in, data out and easily reasoned upon. Nil handling in Ruby is a huge problem as people are chaining methods on mutable objects which becomes complicated, and this is the source of most bugs in Ruby. This is somewhat mitigated lately with safe navigation operator. That is why TypeScript is appealing as you can use typing when you'd like to but still take in "unsafe" JavaScript or write in JS. Unlike if you were using Elm and had to write a wrapper to conform all JS code coming in. Spec in Clojure is very nice as you can enforce and conform types where you need it, and also make generative testing for free. If there is some mass migration to OCaml, F# and Haskell I have yet to see it because very few businesses use them and the communities are much smaller.