[basman]

So yes, they would be runtime errors in Python. But that's not such a catastrophe, actually. The way I write Python is by being in an IPython shell, writing short functions, unit-testing them as I go. So the development-time cost of those runtime errors is not very high, and in my experience offset by the flexibility and interactiveness. Writing in a functional style without much mutable state is really the thing that I find saves development/debugging time.

[sampo]

> The way I write Python is by being in an IPython shell, writing short functions, unit-testing them as I go.

One can write Scala the same way in a Scala shell.