I’ve seen some variation of this accusation being thrown around for years- and frequently by people who I regard as smart, capable developers. On the other hand

I’ve seen some variation of this accusation being thrown around for years- and frequently by people who I regard as smart, capable developers. On the other hand, having worked with languages all over the spectrum of static typing- I’ve also seen first how how high the bar really is for benefiting from static types before you hit diminishing returns. The best answer I can come up with is that people just seem to have differently wired brains. For me, static typing- even fairly sophisticated static typing, is simple. It makes the code simpler, easier to reason about, easier to refactor, and with a sufficiently expressive type system it lets you build things in a much more intuitive way than you could otherwise. It’s not about solving puzzles for the sake of them- types remove a big part of the puzzle by letting me explicitly write things down- and letting the compiler keep track of the details. Certainly plenty of people don’t see it that way, and I’ve heard a lot of people make similar arguments about dynamic typing being simpler and more expressive. I don’t think they are lying but I see a big pile of inscrutable pain when I work in large dynamically types codebases. I know I’m right about my experience, and I trust other people are right about theirs, so there must be some significant divide in how we conceptualize code that makes one persons elegant simplicity another’s intolerable complexity.