For me at least, being statically typed is overall a strength. Yeah, it's not that much work to include types when declaring vars, but the benefits are you don't have the problems with types in expressions that you do with dynamically typed languages (Javascript for example, which is one the reasons why Typescript was created).
... although, Java have does support some dynamic typing, as you now don't need to have the type when instantiating objects, using the "var" keyword and the compiler will infer the type from the object that is being set to it (although, this is just syntactic sugar).
`var` has nothing to do with dynamic typing. It is still statically (compile time) typed, so the type can not change at runtime. Compare that to JavaScript where you could easily switch the type of a variable from Number to String.
agreed, it's not (as mentioned, it's just syntactic sugar). Still, how often is changing the type of a var needed? (besides minor casting issues)
And not saying that dynamic typing doesn't have a place, I really like working in Python, it's just that for more complicated code, prefer statically typed as it leads to less problems with your expressions. To each their own.
... although, Java have does support some dynamic typing, as you now don't need to have the type when instantiating objects, using the "var" keyword and the compiler will infer the type from the object that is being set to it (although, this is just syntactic sugar).