What value does static typing bring to the table?

Ans: 30+ years ago I sat next to the legendary Ed McCreight as he refactored the XEROX PARC home-brew Mesa (Modula 2 like) coded VLSI layout system to create a rolling demo for the official opening of the new Integrated Circuit Laboratory. Within minutes he had rebuilt the system and it ran first time; no unit test required. I was hooked.

Also, the early XEROX Alto which was originally coded in BCPL had a famous debugger error, for a non-US-sportsperson : “Punt”. Subsequent production Office hardware with s/ware written in Mesa did not.