> But, for a lot of if not most of practical web development, you can use dynamic typing, and most children do not need that level of micromanagement.
I use TypeScript because that level of "micromanagement" saves me more time in avoiding bugs than I spend adding static annotation. Hell, the improved intellisense alone means I no longer need to read docs in a lot of cases, meaning writing code is faster for me too - even ignoring bug rates. (Of course, it's sometimes prudent to check the docs for things like edge cases regardless.)
In C++-land, I've started using e.g. clang's threading annotations to good effect in catching some of the most heinous bugs to debug - incorrect multithreaded code that forgets to do simple things like lock mutexes meant to protect data structures.
I've dabbled in a toy project in Rust-land. The ability to catch and prevent data races is fascinating, and the ability to stem the tide of null dereferences at runtime seems pretty handy. Have you never had a hell-to-reproduce null deref that only occurs in your release builds? It's pretty bad when it ships to a large number of customers.
I see SQL injection vulnerabilities, and wish APIs properly segregated SQL Data from SQL Commands - two entirely different types of things entirely.
And yet for awhile I was a lot more forgiving of dynamically typed languages. Until I was able to compare JavaScript vs TypeScript - which I'd argue started as basically JavaScript with static typing tacked on as, effectively, an afterthought.
> If you argue that you need types because otherwise you can't be safe, I'm sorry, but that's like being a helicopter-parent.
If helicopter parents were as beneficial as static typing, I'd have a lot less against them.