And poeple often think that languages with static references always look like Java where you have to declare those. Other languages with static references can infer them from the programm and developers don’t need to declare them (think Haskell, Scala). But I think it’s a good practice to declare them, this documents the developers intent and most developers don’t like to document their code. So every documentation the compiler forces on developers, is a good thing :-)

“Be careful on your terminology – strong typing doesn’t mean the same thing as static typing. Ruby and Lisp are strongly-typed languages,”

The biggest problem with typing terminology is that people don’t distinguish between reference typing and object typing. In Java objects are static typed and references ar static typed. In some languages, especially dynamic languages, references are dynamic, they can change or are not typed at all. The same goes for objects, which can by dynamic typed (JS might be an example) or static typed (I think Python falls in this category). Ruby has static typed objects, but they can be changed, so someone can argue they are dynamic typed too. People often call static/static systems strong and dynamic/static and dynamic/dynamic systems weak (The combination static/dynamic doesn’t work).

If the application is a website or a solutions based, then wiring services using annotations or using code is better for all the advantages mentioned in this post.