There are people who like to bad-mouth Java as being verbose and tout dynamically typed languages. I disagree with much of what such people say, as I find type declarations a valuable form of compiler validated documentation, especially in an unfamiliar codebase. At a previous job, I had to work on some Python code that I had to learn. The guy who wrote it had been laid off and didn't write it for understandability, having described the code as "dense" on at least one occasion. This guy is one of those who bad-mouths Java for being verbose. Anyhow, when working on the code, I found that the lack of type declarations made it much more difficult to find the code that was being called. I also had to work on some unfamiliar Ruby code, and the same applies. My next job was initially working on an unfamiliar codebase of Java and C++ (for Android), and finding the code was much easier, which was good, since it was tracking down numerous bugs that turned out to be race conditions in using code primarily written for iOS.