[pmontra]

Skipping that saves a lot of keypresses and time. I always found very little help from static typing. I know what I'm doing if I type hash = {} in Ruby and there is no need to declare it as HashTable (what else could it possibly be?). About the types of the keys and values, they don't matter much in my experience. Maybe it's Ruby or it's Rails, but they tend to fall right into place without surprises.

[evilduck]

In case you're not aware, many static languages have implicit typing nowadays. I still write Ruby most often, but for example in Go you could just write `something := "string"` and with that := operator it'll manage the type assignment for you. Lots of other static languages offer that now also. I'm not well versed on modern Java, but the type system in Go pretty much gets out of the way for the things I've done with it.

[scrame]

> I type hash = {} in Ruby and there is no need to declare it as HashTable (what else could it possibly be?)

In java you have options other than a HashMap, there is LinkedHashMap (which preserves insertion order) and TreeMap (which stays sorted according to a comparator). There are also extensions for things like Immutability. The checking can also guarantee that it will only have one type of object, or a common interface, or you could allow it to accept any kind of object.

So, yeah, there's quite a few things that an associative array could be, and there's reasons for all that, and i've used most of these on web backends.