I never found myself wishing for a better type system, because my idea of "static" typing came from C and Java, where it is mixed up with variable declaration,

I never found myself wishing for a better type system, because my idea of "static" typing came from C and Java, where it is mixed up with variable declaration, state, and a bunch of other things it has no right to be associated with. Basically, I was scarred. A good type system quietly and with minimal programmer effort encodes and documents your code, helps you find mistakes faster, guides your re-factoring, and gets out of your way when you don't want to deal with it.