[pdpi]

Structure is a tool. Like any tool, it can be misused or overused.

For anything even remotely production-y I'll always prefer explicitly parsing JSON into a known structure, but there's a lot of value in in being able to do some exploratory scripting without those constraints.

[preseinger]

Yes! Exploratory scripting is a categorically different thing than programming, though, I think.

[convolvatron]

not necessarily. there is a bottom up school of thought that encourages people to noodle around and construct primitives by playing in the domain, and then interactively composing those primitives into larger and larger systems.

[preseinger]

Yeah, that's true. It's a judgment call for sure, but I've always found that angle on things to be self-subversive. The best programmers I know are all bottom-up learners, not top-down.