It's a form of automation, which is, for understandable reasons, the most popular form of "progressive" PL thought. With a very powerful type system, the compil

It's a form of automation, which is, for understandable reasons, the most popular form of "progressive" PL thought. With a very powerful type system, the compiler can make inferences about the program that would otherwise be the programmer's burden. A powerful type system that is also safe allows whole classes of errors to either cease to exist, or be moved from runtime testing(where the programmer needs time and debugging skill to pinpoint their origin) to a compile-time error message. Either way, effort is saved each time the type system catches one of those errors.