> I credit the compiler as The Great Filter for autodidactism. That's an interesting idea, I've noticed over 30 years of programming that in general the progra

> I credit the compiler as The Great Filter for autodidactism. That's an interesting idea, I've noticed over 30 years of programming that in general the programmers who learned programming using compilers (particularly the more 'pedantic' ones) are generally more rigorous than the ones who learned with interpreted languages. I've also noticed that (again a horrible generalisation) that the ones who learned with compilers are more likely to check return values and such even interpreted languages. Personally, I've always preferred 'simple' languages that have insanely pedantic compilers over interpreted languages (which is somewhat amusing since I spend my life writing Python, PHP and Javascript) particularly ones with strong typing as most errors I make are simple assumptions that foo is TypeA and it ended up TypeB.