[glangdale]

Incendiary though the phrasing is, I'm halfway inclined to agree with you. There's a lot to be said for a solid, simple strong typing system. But some of the more sophisticated type systems that I either seen or read research literature about (I had a colleague who was doing PhD research in 'refinement types') are seem like they are hitting diminishing returns for programmer ease-of-use while catching an ever-diminishing number of bugs.

If you allotted me a finite amount of effort to put a codebase (a) into a strong type system, (b) festoon it with lots of pre- and post-conditions and asserts, (c) run it through every static checker under the sun, (d) build a huge suite of tests, (e) find a way to formally verify critical algorithms in it with (say) Z3, (f) carry out fuzz testing, ... I'd probably say "do the easy stuff from most of these categories" rather than "pick the One True Path and figure that that will save you from all your bugs".