The type systems in Haskell, OCaml, etc. fit the author's requirements for automated testing. Once you have enough experience to trust them when they check whet

The type systems in Haskell, OCaml, etc. fit the author's requirements for automated testing. Once you have enough experience to trust them when they check whether local changes are still globally correct, making bold changes to clean things up stops feeling reckless. (Automated testing suites are still helpful, but the type system writes/adapts many of the test cases for you.) But what I find more alarming, is that the author completely misses the human side from the perspective of programmers: a good programmer that is forbidden from changing ugly code will become frustrated and will either become less productive or leave. YES. The inevitable pain and misery in maintaining a really huge, ill-factored codebase can scare good developers away. While solving hard technical problems is often intrinsically rewarding for hackers, solving problems largely caused by disorganization is just a sigh of relief at best.