I spent the last few weeks, part time, developing a web application using java (Struts/Hibernate/Spring). For the first time, I consciouly took note of how much time I spent converting types, e.g., the number 100, some wants it to be long, some String, some Long, and then the dreaded "List/Vector of Long" to long[], or Long[]. In perl, one hardly ever needs to do these.

Furtheremore, in java, it's not often that I make a ClassCastException during runtime. One can argue that's because the compiler caught most for me, but even during compilation, the most often occured error of this type for me is forgetting to cast to an concrete object when doing iterator.next() or List.get(), but in that case, the compiler isn't really helping me in any way: I'm already assigning to the right type. Similarly, in perl, without static typing, I don't remember making many "ClassCastException" type of errors. So I'm claiming that at least this asepct of static typing is mostly a waste of time as pratical programming goes.

In reply to Static typing is mostly a waste of time by johnnywang

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