I find it amusing how many people dismiss Java's static typing as a waste of time and stupid. I image that most of the people saying this are fairly ignorant of java. Static typing might be a pain because you have to do explicit cast. But it greatly speeds up developement time because it catches a lot of errors at compile time that would be very hard to track down when they happen as runtime errors in perl. Just because johnnywant doesn't know how to use typing doesn't make it useless.