I can understand using static typing if you already have a large codebase that's statically typed, but is there any reason you'd start a project with a statically typed language?
Yeah the benefits of static typing are front-loaded at the start of a project. I might rewrite in a statically-typed language for performance if it ever needs it, but I wouldn't start statically-typed.
My lisp interpreter above allows me to tear out a lisp function and replace it with a C function, while leaving the unit tests untouched.