Well, no, the dishonesty is basically in arguing that statically-typed languages have all sorts of wonderful features... while omitting that the set of statically-typed languages which have those features, and the set of statically-typed languages people actually use, do not overlap much.
It's dishonest because no matter how many hot HN-echo-chamber companies you can find using Scala, it is still a language that nobody uses, in terms of the broader industry.
No. Discussing what static type systems do means discussing what static type systems do. Not pretending static type systems can't do anything java doesn't do. We don't judge dynamic typing by how shitty PHP is for the same reason. Dynamic typing is not what made PHP shitty, it just happens to be both dynamically typed and shitty.
