> being able to pass a list and get an integer in return, makes it very easy to reason about what you can do with these values I disagree; to paraphrase Ian Ma

> being able to pass a list and get an integer in return, makes it very easy to reason about what you can do with these values I disagree; to paraphrase Ian Malcolm: what you can do with these values is less important than what you should do with these values. For example, we can add a distance to a currency, if they're both int or float; that doesn't mean we should. The most obvious example of this is "stringly-typed programming", where pretty much everything is "string". Can I append a user-input string to an SQL statement string? Sure; but I shouldn't. Can I append a UserInput to an SQLStatement? Not without conversion (i.e. escaping)!