don’t find types to be worth the trouble This is the part I always fail to grok in discussions about type systems. For me it is just the opposite: I typically

don’t find types to be worth the trouble This is the part I always fail to grok in discussions about type systems. For me it is just the opposite: I typically don't find dynamic typing to be worth the trouble, so I fail to understand this sentiment when going the other direction. Maybe it's because my degree is in mathematics (lots of proofs written out long-hand), and my first language was Java? I have since all but abandoned many of the ideas that Java so rigidly enforces, OOP among them, but static typing just has so many advantages for me that I have no desire to get rid of it. One thing I've noticed in some recent work is that the static language I'm using (Go) allows me to both be lazier and get more done than comparable work being done in dynamic languages. I'm not reading or writing tons of documentation (I'm reading other people's code directly, or just looking at the types involved and moving on). I'm not constantly handling byzantine runtime errors or having to memorize the arbitrary intricacies of any over-bearing frameworks in order to be productive. I don't need to be on guard quite so much, I lean on static analysis. In general I just don't need to hold so much extraneous crap in my head, it's all spelled out right there in the code and I'm free to think about larger concerns, like the best way to solve the problem at hand. And when I circle back around to some 10-20k line library I wrote 3-6 months ago, I can read, understand and refactor parts of it quickly. People often talk about developer comfort and speed being improved by dynamic languages, and maybe that's true if Rails solves all your business needs, but for many of the tasks I've work on, that just hasn't borne out over the past 10 years. I have no doubt that dynamic languages seemed a breath of fresh air after fighting with C/C++/Java, but to my eyes Ruby/Python/Javascript etc were always a bridge too far for a lot of tasks.