Something like ruby is great for WRITING greenfield code. But without static typing, diving into and maintaining an existing codebase that you just got hired on

Something like ruby is great for WRITING greenfield code. But without static typing, diving into and maintaining an existing codebase that you just got hired on to deal with becomes a lot more stressful. And that's why there's still plenty of legacy Java code, but legacy ruby code over the last decade has been much quicker to get thrown away and rewritten. I once took over a Java codebase that was clearly created entirely by people who barely knew Java and I was still able to fully understand (and, in the process, refactor it to cut it in half, because half of the code was dead code by the time I encountered it, lol) in about a week. This was not a very large codebase to be honest, but it would have been impractical without static typing and a good IDE that leverages the same. Dude, the reason programmers fear abstraction is because they've had to maintain legacy codebases. It sounds like you've been lucky enough to mostly be able to do greenfield stuff or maintaining codebases that aren't very old. I am sure you would understand their views more if you had more experience with maintenance.