Yes, you're right, it's not about how explicit you are, or even how explicit you have to be. You can write "stringly typed" code in a static language where none

Yes, you're right, it's not about how explicit you are, or even how explicit you have to be. You can write "stringly typed" code in a static language where none of your assumptions are apparent in the type system. Conversely, regardless of your typing discipline, you can be completely explicit about your assumptions just by writing comments. This fits in a larger point that, in the end, the technical qualities of a language in many ways matter less than the culture surrounding the language. Even Haskell has unsafePerformIO which means that none of its guarantees about referential transparency actually hold, in theory. In practice, the culture of the language ensures that, when you pull in a library, you can be pretty sure that it's not riddled with unsafePerformIO, and you can almost always treat code as if referential transparency is guaranteed. A language may facilitate certain habits and discourage other habits. I feel that statically typed languages do not force me to be explicit about my assumptions, but they certainly encourage it by providing immediate benefits to doing so (automated reasoning), and through the culture that surrounds these languages.