I am surprised though that you were completely ignorant of the benefits of static typing outside of Java. I would think that simply out of curiosity you would do a language survey just to get an idea of what else is out there.
Persuading you on the general demerits of Java wasn't really my intention; my point was that if you want get more people on the static typing train, Java is a bad ambassador and might work against you.
I am surprised though that you were completely ignorant of the benefits of static typing outside of Java. I would think that simply out of curiosity you would do a language survey just to get an idea of what else is out there.
Well, back then (early 2000s) I was a self-taught teenager with a poorer grasp of English (I'm not a native speaker), so while my curiosity did lead me to discover a few languages (JavaScript, PHP, Python, Lua and C), anything remotely approaching "academic" - Haskell, OCaml, Oberon, etc - was out of bounds for me.
Since C was the only other statically-typed language I knew, and I also knew it was much older and designed for much slower machines, I assume static typing was mostly for efficiency, like manual memory management.
Types, especially those that could easily be inferred and that provide no value to the programmer. Writing types down can be useful - Python programmers do it too. Having to tell the compiler every little thing is crap.
Like what?
Type erasure. Having to treat primitives and arrays differently from other types. No first class functions or classes. I won't go on, the arguments are easy to find.