I would even assert the amount of typing you get in a language like Java or even C is very useful. I think a big reason why the python 2 to python 3 transitio

I would even assert the amount of typing you get in a language like Java or even C is very useful. I think a big reason why the python 2 to python 3 transition was so painful was a lack of static typing. Unlike other languages where if you update to the new version and get a whole bunch of build errors about methods not existing for a type or this function now returns a different type, you had to run an %80 of the way there migrator who's effects you weren't completely sure about and run your app through your unit test suite. Almost nobody has %100 unit test coverage to approximate what a build statically typed language compiler does, some functions 'worked' anyway due to duck typing and did behaviors that were different than what you were expecting and a bunch of methods returned a slightly different string type that gave more errors, only when you ran the code, each exception at a time. While in a static language you can just run it, and you would of saw all the places where a function now returned a bytestring and deal with them all at once, properly. I've dealt with several breaking change migrations with the swift language, and although annoying, it was tractable and only took a day or two without worries about hidden gotchas. Nowadays my minimum requirements for static types are: - Nullable types (does this type container accept nil or not) - Very basic generics for containers - Typical static typing features Bonus: - Enums with variables (also known as ADTs) The reason why I chose these features specifically is they give you a lot of benefit, but are not actually slow to compile and not complicated to implement for language maintainers when first writing a language. I hope golang has all of them one day.