[kemiller]

I think it's a matter of personality. Dynamic language people (to the extent there are such people... most of us use both) are generally not scared at all to change things. We're just more comfortable with the intervening chaos. For instance I might want to change some underlying model code without worrying that it breaks every single page in the site except the one I'm using to work on it, or the individual test. Sometimes I want to work on the heart of the matter first and clean up details later instead of working on the compiler's set of priorities.

[pka]

Sure. In Haskell for example you can turn type errors into warnings with a compiler flag. If you then encounter a type error at runtime the program will crash, much like in a dynamic language. And if it turns out the change was a dead end, just git checkout master and you're done.

However, if not, you'll still have a list of compiler errors you have to fix to make the rest of the program work. This alone lets me refactor with confidence, much more so than every dynamic language I've ever used.