You actually can't see the advantage of statically typed languages unless you've worked on a non-trivial codebase. I've never used Smalltalk, but the other two

You actually can't see the advantage of statically typed languages unless you've worked on a non-trivial codebase. I've never used Smalltalk, but the other two you mention suffer from massive problems when you get to a certain size codebase. I'm extremely wary of saying this, but I generally think that uni professors/tutors can't program. Basically unless they've written a large open source program or actually worked in the industry for a lot of years, they're probably going to be useless programmers. And even then, there's a good chance they're useless programmers. That may be a slightly old fashioned view, but most lectures I've seen from unis online tend to completely miss the point of basic concepts (OO being the most common one). And it's rare to meet graduate CS who can actually program anything on their own from scratch. Google's fine, but cut & pasting code you don't understand and changing random stuff as it sounds kinda right, that's not programming, that's a bloody rain dance. Programming is a skill that needs years of work before you're even vaguely good. And the worst part is you're almost constantly suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect, thinking you're much, much better than you actually are. I probably still am. It's one of the reasons we see security holes time and time again, novices don't even realise the problem exists! For example, I have no idea what to do with crash dump in windbg. I wouldn't even know where to start. Is that a massive knowledge gap? But give me a stack trace of a problem & the source in almost any web language and I'd probably be able to fix it, even if I've never used the programming language before.