[f1shy]

>> People are far too obsessed with static type checking.

I have to fully agree with this. At least here in HN, I see all the time comments "language is good, but does not have static typing." As it was THE thing needed.

Of course it helps, but I think is greatly exaggerated.

I think many people code as some of my colleges did Physics in the university: they looked at the data available in the problem description, and searched formulas to plug the data, just looking at the units, where the output unit was the correct for the answer required. In a similar way I see people smashing things at APIs without reading the documentation, using bad naming, having tens of variables in 10 line functions, all because "no problem, if something is wrong, it won't compile!".

I have written tens of thousands of lines of code in dynamic typed languages, and I can count and remember the few times I had a problem related to types. Out of those, only 2 times I had a somewhat difficult time debugging (couple of hours).