What languages have you tried? I think once you experience a language with types outside of the run of the mill Java/C#, you will get more excited about it. Ocaml, Rust, Haskell, Purescript, etc. Haskell for me was the one that got me excited about types.
ive only used vbscript and javascript extensibly. when ive tried java and #C ive been annoyed by the verbosity of types. and when looking at haskel or ocaml im just confused. for me types are an optimization or extra documentation for undescriptive naming, like str x, int y, list z. vs. name,age,friends.
so i want to know what im missing, will there be less bugs and regressions? will i be more productive ?
> for me types are an optimization or extra documentation for undescriptive naming,
This is one of those things where you should try to reserve judgement about it because your experience is so limited. Modern typed languages often don't even require you to write the type, because of type inference.
> will there be less bugs and regressions? will i be more productive ?
The idea with static analysis is that you're pushing more errors into the type system so it's caught at compile time rather than runtime. Everyone will answer this differently.
IMO a dynamic type system doesn't make you more productive because the same invariants you have from not having an explicit type still exist in the code, they just go unchecked. For example, if I write a function to add 1 to a number, in a dynamic language if I pass a string I'll get some output that is invalid if I'm expecting the result to be a number elsewhere. Types let you encode those invariants. But encoding simple types and primitives is really just scratching the surface, I could ramble on for ages here but you should just dive into a language with a good type system (like Haskell or Ocaml like you mentioned) and stick with it long enough to give it a chance. It's so much more than just being and to say 'int' or 'string'.
Speaking of adding to a number, in some dynamic languages, you can add 3/5 to 7/5 and the result will be 2, of type integer, indistinguishable from the object produced by a literal 2. That 3/5 and 7/5 come from some run-time source, so the result type can't be statically hard-coded to integer or rational or whatever. And so now on the static side you're into variant types and "maybes" and other junk creating an incomprehensible soup which basically Greenspuns dynamic typing in a way that will get your name cursed by subsequent maintainers.
I can't make heads or tails of what your criticism is. Algebraic types are wonderful, I find it difficult to code in a language without them. I'd hardly call it 'junk'.
