Following up, I'm almost certain that a rigorously followed coding convention is entirely equivalent to a sufficiently powerful type system. The coding conventi

Following up, I'm almost certain that a rigorously followed coding convention is entirely equivalent to a sufficiently powerful type system. The coding conventions are statically fixed at compile time, and can therefore are decidable at compile time. One possible advantage that conventions have is that they can be easier to understand, and they can be transparently and painlessly broken when they don't make sense. In other words, they're equivalent to a weak (ie, can have holes punched in it), informal type system.