In my experience, static typing seemed to lend itself to poor testing, maybe some sort of belief that static types were good enough to not need tests that can prevent regressions. So from my point of view the static typing is negative value. It prevents such a low value class of bugs while seemingly incentivizing people to be lax with the most important classes of bugs.
I am totally convinced that the advocates of dynamic programming are right, too, just possibly built differently. For example, if I had an order of magnitude more working memory than I have as an individual (I'm assuming that's neurologically plausible), maybe I'd view dynamic programming differently, too.
The way that I write static-typed code is by imagining how I would write dynamic code to solve the problem, and then additionally imagining what types and type constraints I need to add.
I honestly think it’s a kind of an instance of Paul Graham’s Blub Paradox. I know JavaScript and I spent years writing JavaScript. So if you ask me to write TypeScript, well, I write the JavaScript that I want to write and then go back and add types to make the typescript compiler happy.
There are a bunch of other things I could talk about. I should write a post.
Neither do I, but I know the compiler will check that for me so I don't need to hold all of that in working memory. I know my IDE will always be able to tell me the types too, and flag if anything is wrong immediately.
The different points of view on this are really interesting.
Is that not how everyone writes static typed code? You have a need for a variable holding some data, you think about the bounds of that data, you pick a type. What other way would you do it?
The problem with dynamic typing isn't in the first-write. It's all in your head then. It's in the 2 year later bugfix, when you're looking at a function and wondering what kind of data is being passed into it. And then you find all the places that call that function and still can't work out what fields that object will have, or whether they're numbers or strings.
I do agree though if I have to work with spaghetti code, I'd much rather work with a language that has a proper type system (I mean a proper one, like OCaml, Standard ML, Rust, Gleam, Etc.) I think static typing in these languages doesn't get in the way, they all have varying degrees of type inference, the type system is sound and uncomplicated. Whereas a Language like Typescript's type system (of Facebook's Flow for JS) had my head spinning, It often felt like playing a mean spirited scavenger hunt with Simon from Simon says.
As far as dynamic langs go, some languages are terrible to work in, (Perl). and other languages because of strong conventions (Ruby and Elixir,) I find very very easy to work in, write tests, create libraries that use DSLs, etc.
So I guess I'm in the middle? leaning in the dynamic langs direction though.
I still remember being quite shocked many years ago when I took a job using Java of all things, I was so fearful coding would take forever. It was my first typed language. But within months, I was faster, by a lot. I would write a lot more code before I had to test it, and once I began testing it there were few if any surprises. Now I'm working in Ruby, and without a debugger and constant tests, I feel I can't hardly get anything complex done in a reasonable amount of time. Like you I thought this was a hurdle that would pass, but while I'm far more effective than when I started, I find that its overall just mentally taxing to write code in this language.
Yet at the same time, when I pair with people who do not dislike Ruby, and watch them work, they are constantly asking "What is this" and "how does this work" and navigating parts of the codebase by grepping. They are effective, and I know its been studied a bit. But to my eyes, they would so obviously be far more effective with types, even when they state they dislike them, I just can't accept its a generally better approach in the absolute sense. I won't judge people for preferring a non-typed language. But I'll likely not accept another job where I can't use a typed language.
