[tikhonj]

I think the issue is that there are good statically typed languages and there are bad statically typed languages but only the latter are popular.

I've done a good bit of programming in Java and that was painful, with relatively little benefit. In fact, for a pretty long time, Java made my an adherent of dynamic typing.

Then I tried Haskell and realized that a good static typing system is very useful. It not only catches mistakes--I've worked on very language interpreters in both Python and Haskell, and I constantly made preventable mistakes in Python--but actually makes your code more expressive. Take the read function, for example. (It is basically the opposite of toString.) I can't think of any way of writing it in a dynamically typed language because it has to know what type it's supposed to be to work--it's polymorphic on its return type. And this is very useful: if you have a string, you can just read it in and it will be of whatever type you need (as long as you've defined how its read).

Haskell has some other advantages over Java (e.g. much more lightweight types and no messing about with classes and subclasses), but I think the important point is that static typing done right is not only safer but also sometimes more expressive than dynamic typing.