> I'm in the minority because I've spent an unusual amount of time investing in my understanding of programming languages and their features, not because I have some fringe unjustified opinion.
I was just making a statement of fact. You're probably a very good programmer (as most type nerds, to coin a new term, tend to be), but still in the minority. Most programmers are not very good, and even good ones sometimes want to build things fast. (Where type ambiguity or even incorectness is accepted as a viable trade-off.)
This is why I stopped prototyping in Java, for example. JS just let me "do stuff" without thinking about it too hard. Lower code quality? Of course; but it let me try out more ideas in the same amount of time. Should you use JavaScript to write the operating system of a pacemaker? Probably not.
IMO there is also 'culture' to various programming languages in their styles, standard libraries and so on. I think Java as language is actually fine, it's all the crap that surrounds it that makes it more unproductive or not. I find my self even once I get past 2000 lines that using something like python is less productive than a statically typed language.
I was just making a statement of fact. You're probably a very good programmer (as most type nerds, to coin a new term, tend to be), but still in the minority. Most programmers are not very good, and even good ones sometimes want to build things fast. (Where type ambiguity or even incorectness is accepted as a viable trade-off.)
This is why I stopped prototyping in Java, for example. JS just let me "do stuff" without thinking about it too hard. Lower code quality? Of course; but it let me try out more ideas in the same amount of time. Should you use JavaScript to write the operating system of a pacemaker? Probably not.