It's very clear that you have a rock-solid and passionately emotional commitment on this issue already. I'm sorry I mistook your question for good-faith interes

It's very clear that you have a rock-solid and passionately emotional commitment on this issue already. I'm sorry I mistook your question for good-faith interest in tradeoffs. I'm not going to engage deeply beyond this. I work in statically typed languages for a living. On the whole I think this is a sensible choice for my employer. Sometimes I don't like it. Sometimes when I have a choice (personal projects, or ancillary scripts/utilities) I'll reach for untyped Python. These are the reasons. a) The type checker is a lifeline that will save you from one kind of error in untested code. But there are lots of ways to screw up untested code. You need testing anyway. And what will be caught statically by the type checker, will be caught at runtime during an adequate test suite. b) Nullability invalidates the guarantee that a type system is supposed to provide: that values are the right type. The boilerplate, error prone check is necessary anyway to deal with the null. Yes, there are better type systems that don't have this problem. But static typing as actually practiced today (in general, I'm not talking about Python) has this problem very often. c) This is true only if you're a library. Your type system can't statically guarantee anything about the bytes that will arrive on a socket, which is your actual interface when you're a network service. Parsing and validation must be done at runtime. d) Over-specification of data is endemic to the culture of static typing. In the large, people think they need to map any values they receive to an internally defined struct or class, dropping any parts of the record they don't understand. Not doing this is seen as incorrect, irresponsible, or as you put it, less rigorous. But doing it leads to a lot of coding time wasted on mapping between representations and threading new fields through all the places a record is handled. Some static type systems offer facilities to help alleviate this problem. I'd argue that to the extent you're using those facilities, you're walking back down the spectrum towards dynamic typing.