It holds even more so at small scale because I can pretty confidently move a method up an inheritance chain or rename a class and count on the compiler catching

It holds even more so at small scale because I can pretty confidently move a method up an inheritance chain or rename a class and count on the compiler catching everything. In a bigger codebase I have to be more careful about breaking somebody's excessively dynamic code that might be pointing to those things in a roundabout way. As an experiment last year I started teaching myself machine learning by implementing the common algorithms in Clojure and Scala simultaneously. I expected Clojure to win out and worked a lot harder in the beginning but after a while I was forced to concede that my Scala code was cleaner, faster, and less buggy, partly because I felt comfortable changing things because I knew the compiler would help me.