[tel]

I think on top of this the self-documenting properties of a nice statically typed system push back the onset of code ossification quite a lot. I always trust my type documentation while I tend to be a skeptic of documentation that's more than a few months old unless it's being actively refactored regularly.

[Periodic]

A strong type system can give you a lot of "free" documentation and I love it! I long for a search engine like Hoogle in other languages (http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/). Most functions are very obvious from their signature and name.

My favorite example are two functions with the signatures:

    fun1: a -> a
    fun2: Int -> Int

You might think the first is more powerful because it takes any type and returns that type, but ultimately, that function can only be the identify function (barring unusual things like exceptions, undefined values and runtime introspection). With the second function it could do all sorts of things. It might increment, it might decrement, it might divide by two and round down if the argument is a multiple of three.

I'll go further to say that it's very frustrating in languages like C++ and Java to have to deal with statics and objects. They have a lot of hidden state that isn't obvious from the type signature of their methods. Particularly the fact that some methods must be called before others—e.g. initializers—can make the behavior and side-effects non-obvious.