A fair and balanced (well, not really) look at the static vs. dynamic typing schism.
I used to be a strong believer in static typing back when I was doing C++ programming. (That was actually something I did for a really long time — I was, in fact, somewhat religiously convinced there was a multitude of conceptual advantages C++ had over Smalltalk. Blame it on my youth.) Nowadays, the only advantage of static typing I still concede is the better support for IDEs and code completion, which you arguably would not need if you didn’t start with a verbose, unmanageable and ungrowable language in the first place.
“… which you arguably would not need if you didn’t start with a verbose, unmanageable and ungrowable language in the first place”
I find good IDE support and code completion utterly invaluable when working on a large codebase with which I’m not familiar. I’m not sure I’m ready to trade that off for a sexier programming language.