I actually agree, but I don't think most people do and there are times when static typing isn't as much fun - like say pulling data from an API and shoveling it

I actually agree, but I don't think most people do and there are times when static typing isn't as much fun - like say pulling data from an API and shoveling it on to a page or through some filtering or something like that or just doing some random UI manipulation with jQuery or the like. Most developers see the pain and are given a deadline and so they do it dirty and hope to have a chance to pay downy that technical debt later. Later almost never happens until the system crashes beyond repair and the instability starts costing money in the form of downtime. In the grand scheme of things, maintenance is always the most expensive part of a system, but "prototyping" languages that aren't particularly safe or maintainable are inherently going to be more expensive to maintain and deal with over the long term. Ironically, dynamic languages like Ruby have taken the route of getting really good at unit testing and TDD instead of investing in moving their codebases from "prototypes" to "production" or "LTS" or whatever you would want to call a mature, complex codebase that will need to be maintained and evolved over time. I'm a huge proponent of TDD, and I love Ruby, but the more I use Ruby, the more I see the problems of not having a compiler.