[fc417fc802]

I agree with you that it clearly works well enough in practice and I agree with you that it's murky - specifically I believe that there are substantial upsides provided by the language and its ecosystem.

> It has and continues to happen all the time with no notable ill effects.

But that statement of yours is patently false. The ill effects of duck typing and extreme flexibility in the face of massive code bases and large teams are incredibly well documented at this point. Literally the entire driving force behind typescript is directly analogous to the situation in the python world.

You might as well claim that concurrent programming in C or manual memory management have no notable ill effects. Even if there are places where you think they make more sense clearly they bring lots of fairly serious issues along for the ride.

[jghn]

We're using different metrics here.

Can it cause bugs? Yes. Do teams ship production code that meet their business goals? Also yes. The former doesn't necessarily preclude the latter. And as long as the business keeps on trucking along, complaining about the bugs and headaches is just a matter of engineering sensibilities. Which I agree with fully and grind my teeth every time.

If the business proceeds along just fine, having the perfect temple of dependently typed, category theoried, memory checked, fuzz tested software may have turned out to just be a waste of money.

If, on the other hand, the business does not proceed along just fine because the team can't get anything done due to not being able to understand that a float probably shouldn't go into a variable that's supposed to be a string, then yes, you're right.