I agree. The same people who argue that types make programs slower to write and harder to maintain also argue (incorrectly) that tests have all of the benefits of types and then some. But if you’re writing lots of tests to compensate for types (and indeed I hear many dynamic typing advocates argue for exactly this) then your code is far harder to change than it would be if you just used types in the first place (and for the same reasons that it’s easier to write typed code and a few tests rather than i typed code and lots of tests).

Not only does it not make sense in theory, but in my 15 years with Python and 10 years with Go, it bears out in practice. I’m much more productive in Go because of the tooling and confidence that follow from static types, and that delta only increases as the project grows in lines of code, contributors, and/or age.