> When you refactor, make a change, or try to add new functionality, and end up fighting the type checker. That's friction to change you are experiencing and that experience is optional.
I don't really see that as "fighting the type checker", I see it as the type checker doing its job and warning me of the places where my refactor broke things. The alternative isn't usually that my refactored code magically works, it's that I have to manually grep through the codebase looking for all the places where I might have broken something, and get runtime errors if I don't catch them all.
In that sense the experience of struggling to make a refactor work isn't optional—the choice you get is whether you want the compiler to assist you with it or not.
I realize there are exceptions for certain types of refactors to certain types of functions, but the vast majority of patterns I've ever seen in any codebase—static or dynamic—are patterns that are difficult to refactor without a type checker and trivial to do with one.
To be clear, there are other reasons to prefer dynamic typing, and I'm not trying to say you're wrong to prefer it, but you're not going to get very far trying to persuade a static types fan that refactoring of all things is better in the dynamic world.
I don't really see that as "fighting the type checker", I see it as the type checker doing its job and warning me of the places where my refactor broke things. The alternative isn't usually that my refactored code magically works, it's that I have to manually grep through the codebase looking for all the places where I might have broken something, and get runtime errors if I don't catch them all.
In that sense the experience of struggling to make a refactor work isn't optional—the choice you get is whether you want the compiler to assist you with it or not.
I realize there are exceptions for certain types of refactors to certain types of functions, but the vast majority of patterns I've ever seen in any codebase—static or dynamic—are patterns that are difficult to refactor without a type checker and trivial to do with one.
To be clear, there are other reasons to prefer dynamic typing, and I'm not trying to say you're wrong to prefer it, but you're not going to get very far trying to persuade a static types fan that refactoring of all things is better in the dynamic world.