This is about where I've come down. Back when my job involved writing a lot of greenfield code that I'd also never have to look at ever again, I was pretty fon

This is about where I've come down. Back when my job involved writing a lot of greenfield code that I'd also never have to look at ever again, I was pretty fond of dynamic languages. Nowadays I'm working on a big product with a codebase that ain't getting any younger. For this job, I'm inclined to say static typing is a godsend. Sometimes you can tell a lot about what a function's supposed to do by its parameter and return types that you can't tell by its probably-nonexistent comments or its cryptic name. That said, the last two languages I've worked in both allow you to forego strong typing in favor of duck typing, and sometimes that feature's a godsend, too. I'm starting to think of it roughly the same as I think about mutability: Dynamic typing may not be a great default for maintainability reasons, but at the same time sometimes it's great to have the option for pragmatism's sake. (None of this being anything I can back up empirically, of course.)