And what exactly do static types forbid you from doing? (For the sake of argument let's consider state of the art static type systems such as those found in Haskell, OCaml, Elm and Purescript)
State of the art is hardly relevant, what's relevant are languages in demand by employees that dynamic language are actually in competition with so no I don't accept that restriction for the sake of the argument as it's moving the goalpost. However plenty of meta-programming techniques including the use of dynamically interpreting message sends to methods that don't exist in the context of the receiver, i.e. Smalltalk's doesNotUnderstand or Ruby's method missing are but one example.
Look, I get it, you like static typing, how about accepting that we all don't; we value different things from a language, and extreme late binding in all things is something we value more than being protected from ourselves with a type system. Don't assert to others what they have or haven't learned just because their preferences differ from yours.
I think you're responding to an argument I didn't make.
You claimed "Type bugs just aren't that painful". Haskell allows you to make all sorts of bugs into type bugs, from SQL well-formedness, through certain concurrency guarantees, to guarantees that your HTTP routing is correct. So yes, type bugs can be very painful, and that's a good thing!
"All sorts" in a colloquial sense of "very many". Not literally all sorts.
Yeah, good clarification, thanks!
Using Haskell is more painful than any type bugs it might help fix, no thanks. One can write correct code without a type system to guarantee it for them, we're fine doing this rather than dealing with said pain in the ass type system. Haskell is not my idea of a good programming language, it's not what I want from a programming language, it's not conducive to how I want to program. It's an esoteric language for a reason, few people like it and it'll likely remain that way.
OK, if that's your opinion then fine. I just wanted to challenge your claim "type bugs just aren't that painful". On the contrary, they can be and should be!
You can't challenge a claim about how I feel about something, if I say something doesn't hurt, nothing you can say will convince me it does. Pain is subjective, keep that in mind when trying to tell others how they feel about something.
Conversely you haven't learned the true power of dynamic types or like coding with handcuffs to keep you safe. What static types offer me is not as useful to me as what they forbid me from doing, so no it isn't an issue what what I don't know, but rather of what I do. And Haskell, no thanks, I'm not a masochist.
> and the Python's harder to maintain too!
That's an issue with Python, not with dynamic types. My Smalltalk code is a joy to maintain.