First of all, this is one of those where differences within categories are much greater than those between categories. I'd rather work at a principled Python sh

First of all, this is one of those where differences within categories are much greater than those between categories. I'd rather work at a principled Python shop than a sloppy Scala shop. If you use nulls and go overboard with inheritance, Scala becomes unmaintainable as well. I've never seen sloppy Haskell, but quality of people matters more than the language itself and that's probably largely because the Haskell community is small and elite. That said, for me, it's about flow. (The IDE flamewar gets into the same territory. I just don't like the flow-breaker that is having to use the mouse, when coding.) Writing unit tests can be a flow-breaker. On the other hand, ripping through source code to chase down a NullPointerException (or similar error, like a "List.head []") is annoying at best and extremely disruptive when the error/failure distance is high, as it often can be in dynamic languages. I find, on average, that development is more flowful in statically-typed languages, and even if the development top speed is slower, I think that's made up by the low frequency of flow breakage. That said, Java's version of "static typing" is abysmal and, in a typical corporate shop, you're never going to get into flow in the first place so it doesn't much matter.