> And if you say yes, do you believe they are so worth it that they should be applied across your codebase always, without discretion? Most static programming l

> And if you say yes, do you believe they are so worth it that they should be applied across your codebase always, without discretion? Most static programming languages force you (or make it hard for you not) to do this verification across the board. Yes, actually, I don't find these things to be a particularly high burden, and the benefit, in my experience, easily outweighs it. When you're writing code, you have to think about what kinds of things will be passed to a given function, whether the compiler checks it or not. So I find having the compiler check mundane things like this lowers my cognitive load, because I don't have to worry so much about what to do if I get a null (fail, handle it in some way, etc.). I will agree, though, that the style of programming with maps so prevalent in Clojure makes a lot of sense in some programs. However, even then, there is a typing discipline that fits (row types).