Joel reviews "Beyond Java", and then makes a good point about the hurdles you face as a software developer:

Programming consists of overcoming two things: accidental difficulties, things which are difficult because you happen to be using inadequate programming tools, and things which are actually difficult , which no programming tool or language is going to solve. An example of an accidental difficulty is manual memory management, e.g. “malloc” and “free,” or the singleton classes people create in Java because they don’t have top level functions. An example of something which is actually difficult is dealing with the subtle interactions between different parts of a program, for example, figuring out all the implications of a new feature that you just added.

The key is to try and get out from under the accidental difficulties. Manifest Typing is one of those:

Although Stevey [ed: Yegge] lists lots of accidental difficulties in Java, when you read the book, you will notice a theme, which seems to be that it’s explicit typing, where the programmer is asked to declare the type of things, that leads to most of the problems. For example, the inability to express data in Java code is mostly just a side effect of the requirement that types be declared explicitly. Yes, there are other problems in Java, but this is The Big Hairy Problem right at the heart.

To a historian, it’s starting to look like type declarations are one of those accidental difficulties that good programming languages can eliminate. Beyond Java is a good summary of the arguments and worth reading.

I certainly agree - I think the "Farside" cartoon Yegge used the other day is as good a summary of the problems as any.

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