Persuading you on the general demerits of Java wasn't really my intention; my point was that if you want get more people on the static typing train, Java is a bad ambassador and might work against you.

I am surprised though that you were completely ignorant of the benefits of static typing outside of Java. I would think that simply out of curiosity you would do a language survey just to get an idea of what else is out there.

Well, back then (early 2000s) I was a self-taught teenager with a poorer grasp of English (I'm not a native speaker), so while my curiosity did lead me to discover a few languages (JavaScript, PHP, Python, Lua and C), anything remotely approaching "academic" - Haskell, OCaml, Oberon, etc - was out of bounds for me.

Since C was the only other statically-typed language I knew, and I also knew it was much older and designed for much slower machines, I assume static typing was mostly for efficiency, like manual memory management.