[the_af]

I think part of the problem is that buggy code that compiles produces instant gratification. You see results, even if incomplete. Maybe down the road you'll reach a dead-end due to a problem you didn't foresee, and the buggy code didn't help you find it because it compiled anyway, and you didn't have to think too hard about all cases or about the structure of the problem. And then it may be too late and you'll have to throw everything away and start from scratch.

But in the meantime, you get the feeling you're making progress, even if you're not. I think that's the psychology of the matter.

I'm a Haskell fan (and still a newbie, unfortunately) and I sometimes fall prey to this feeling.

[freyrs3]

There's a lot of study in psychology about how our mental models of our future selves result in the choices in we make in the present. I know quantifiably from having worked in a both ML family languages and the popular dynamic scripting languages that the amortized time I spend debugging the software is far less with the ML-style languages. Yet with the scripting languages there's definitely a psychological appeal of seeing something appear to "work" ( it really doesn't ) and then debugging it into existence, although the engineer in me knows that this is a really bad way to develop solid software in the long run.