Developer Thought Stream

I know there are a bunch of Java devotees out there.  I frequently have them evangelizing the language to me as a "strongly-typed" language that is so much better than loosely-typed languages, like PHP.  So here is something that just came up for me and I'd like to ask all those devotees WHY they like the type enforcement. Here's a bit of code to store a random integer as a string in PHP: $myString = rand(5); And now...the Java version: String myString = String . valueOf ( Integer . valueOf ( Math . random () * 10000 )); I get it...you need to keep your phony-baloney job and writing more  code and making it more complicated can help you keep it out of the hands of less "intelligent" programmers. As for myself, I will always prefer a language that lets me write shorter, more eloquent code and get my applications built faster.  But then...maybe I'm just simple.