It's my opinion that the author is wrong. A lot of the same qualities that make a good REPL for interacting with the system make a good programming language fo

It's my opinion that the author is wrong. A lot of the same qualities that make a good REPL for interacting with the system make a good programming language for interacting with the system. C shell was designed solely for interactive use and is a worse REPL experience for it. Not being able to e.g. redirect compound expressions matters for quick one-liners at least as much as it does for writing scripts. I think the author has an underlying assumption that untyped languages are worse for writing programs, and that's what they mean by "terseness" versus "verbosity". If that's the case then they should probably state that outright. I'm only unsure about this assumption because their pandoc example is non-sensical if that's what they are getting at. There is no fundamental reason that: pandoc -t latex \ -f markdown \ --pdf-engine=xelatex \ --table-of-contents \ --toc-depth=2 \ --resource-path=. \ --standalone \ input.md \ -o output.pdf cannot be statically checked any more or less than Pandoc( input = (Path("input.md"), MD), output = (Path("output.pdf"), PDF), pdfEngine = XELATEX, resourcePath=Path("."), completenessMode=STANDALONE, ) And in fact it's trivial to write a mechanical transformation between the two.