My point is that architecture and programmer ability is a much stronger influence on maintainability than type system IME. Although your experiment would be an

My point is that architecture and programmer ability is a much stronger influence on maintainability than type system IME. Although your experiment would be an interesting one. Java's static typing did make it easier to traverse the code using an IDE, and avoided the occasional subtle type casting bug. The easy integrated debugging was nice too (eg setting remote breakpoints). These benefits were vastly offset by the productivity hit from wading through boilerplate code, language verbosity and dealing with type conversion issues.