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I've been a statically typed bigot for quite a few years. I learned my lesson the hard way while using C. Too many systems crashed in the field due to silly typing errors. When C++ came out, I was an avid adopter, and rabid enforcer of strong typing.
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About two years ago I noticed something. I was depending less and less on the type system for safety. My unit tests were preventing me from making type errors. The more I depended upon the unit tests, the less I depended upon the type safety of Java or C++ (my languages of choice).

I thought an experiment was in order. So I tried writing some applications in Python, and then Ruby (well known dynamically typed languages). I was not entirely surprised when I found that type issues simply never arose. My unit tests kept my code on the straight and narrow. I simply didn't need the static type checking that I had depended upon for so many years.

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