> Of course you have to know the type of an object to manipulate it. How can you not? Not every language requires you to know the strict type of the data to ma

> Of course you have to know the type of an object to manipulate it. How can you not? Not every language requires you to know the strict type of the data to manipulate it. Take `conj` from Clojure as an example. The function adds an entry to a `collection`, so you know it's a collection, but that's all you need to know in most cases. A collection can be a map, vector, list or your own thing, but it "adds a new entry" regardless, which exact behavior depends on what you use with it. Definitely not for everyone, but personally I like the abstracted thinking this leads to. Besides, what I meant with my comment wasn't "I don't need to know anything" but that confusing what types I'm dealing with isn't a typical problem I have when reading/writing code. I thought I made it clear, but I suppose I could have made it clearer. That's on me. > Running code to see the type is pretty much the only option for dynamically typed code but it's clearly vastly inferior: Disagree, it's vastly inferior to rely on types to understand what the data actually is, and evaluating the selected form takes one keyboard shortcut and your editor shows you the actual data + type. Only being able to see the type is clearly vastly inferior to me. I like to be able to see exactly what's going on, not just being able to see kind of what's going on. You never wanted to be able to select a function call inside of another function and be able to see exactly what that returns, without having to do anything else than selecting that piece of code and hitting a keyboard shortcut in your editor? I wouldn't want to trade being able to do that with having static types any day. > Similarly they make automatic variable renaming actually work (IDEs don't have enough information to do it properly otherwise), and they detect errors when you screw up a refactor. I don't know where you get the idea that automatic variable renaming doesn't work outside of statically typed languages. Just because a language isn't statically typed, doesn't mean you can't statically analyze it, see https://clojure-lsp.io/features/ https://clojure-lsp.io/features/ for one example. Worth repeating: It's great that you seem to be getting good value out of statically typed languages, really. But that doesn't mean it's "objectively the best" or whatever, it just means it works great for you with the tradeoffs you're willing to make. Personally, I make other tradeoffs, so other languages are better for me and what I work on. You seem to argue from the standpoint of "Obviously static typing is the best for everything, no doubt" (like many of the statically typing practitioners) but reality is almost never that black and white.