My claim isn't that static typing is harder in general: >... it tends to mean enormous pain when making small obvious fixes to past mistakes, and you really do

My claim isn't that static typing is harder in general: >... it tends to mean enormous pain when making small obvious fixes to past mistakes, and you really don't want to block those. It just makes everything harder in the long term. It's that not making fixes is harder in the long term. That means either manual migrations or automated ones (e.g. API-compatible ones are trivially automation-friendly). And the more difficult you make the migration, the less likely people are to migrate (which I don't think is a contentious claim). Static typing is great, but it does generally mean more full-automation-unfriendly migrations, because it's forcing you to see and make decisions on more kinds of changed assertions. Generally that's a very good thing, but it does add some struggles that looser typing can simply ignore and sometimes still succeed.