Things are of course not so black-and-white. It is hard to discuss these things at a general or abstract level, since things are often different in practice than they are in theory. But my point was to show that there are actual reasonable arguments that you can make in favor of and against static typing, without being disingenuous. For example, you can argue that static types hurt more than they help during refactoring, but the claim is not so obvious that anyone who says otherwise is simply a static typing zealot.