[MaxBarraclough]

That might work fine if you're throwing together a blogging system, but not in a critical-systems software-engineering context. When the stakes are high, it doesn't do to view your code as a creative outlet.

Critical-systems software engineering is not about your creativity, it's about building maximally correct software, to minimise the probability of a catastrophic outcome.

This idea that it's inherently virtuous to let software developers be creative, strikes me as quite wrong-headed. If a strict methodology produces better results (and it does), a strict methodology should be adopted.

Bridge engineers don't whine about their constrained creativity. They're too busy ensuring their creations don't get anyone killed.

With the curious exception of Erlang et al, few people serious about program correctness favour dynamically typed languages. There's a reason why Ada is statically typed, and strongly typed (it lacks the dangerous implicit type conversions permitted by C).

An excellent article on this kind of thing: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff