As we've explored at length, JavaScript is a dynamically typed language. If wielded carefully, this can be a great benefit, allowing you to work quickly and permit a level of flexibility in your code that enables colleagues to work with it less painfully. However, there are situations in which dynamic types can create the possibility of bugs and needless cognitive burdens for programmers. Statically typed compiled languages, such as Java or Scala, force the programmer to specify the types they are expecting at the point of declaration (or infer the type by how it is used, prior to execution).
Static typing has the following potential benefits:
- The programmer can have confidence in the types they'll be dealing with, and thus, can make a number of safe assumptions about the capabilities and characteristics of their values, easing development.
- The code can...
