This is my experience as well. Working with dynamic languages soured my experience with programming so far that I stopped doing projects of my own when I was in

This is my experience as well. Working with dynamic languages soured my experience with programming so far that I stopped doing projects of my own when I was in jobs requiring them. Sounds like hyperbole, but it's something I didn't realise until several years later, after having recovered the joy of programming (which happened because I moved jobs and started using a static language again). I guess that in part it's a matter of mentality or personal style (I know that I think mostly in terms of guarantees, invariants and so on, which is why types are so useful to me; I feel like other people think more in terms of operations when they program, and maybe dynamic programming suits them more). But there are some huge advantages as well. The tooling is far better (like the incremental compilation in Eclipse, also available in IntelliJ but turned off by default IIRC, which highlights compilation error while you are still writing the code); there are fewer unit tests required because there are fewer things that can go wrong, since a lot of them can be enforced by the type system; most important of all, reading someone else's code is far easier because mandatory documentation, in the form of type names, is all over the place (yep, not a fan of type inference either). And there are more and more advantages. I just don't see myself working on even a moderately sized code base in a dynamic language. The pain is too real; I have been there.