[sirclueless]

> static typing by itself gives you next to nothing ... without some form of validation beyond static typing

You mean like the validation you get when you compile a program?

Yes, a statically typed program that never gets checked is strictly worse than a dynamic program, but that's the whole point of the type system: you can check it. This argument is a strawman because nearly every language with a static type system includes a validation step (maybe Dart is an up-and-coming counterexample).