In your framing there's a sort of implicit downplaying of the frequency of exploratory work and an implicit promotion of stricter work. > Something like using

In your framing there's a sort of implicit downplaying of the frequency of exploratory work and an implicit promotion of stricter work. > Something like using MATLAB for exploratory research is probably another decent example. Or maybe hackathon games. But for most games, data analysis, machine learning etc. then being stricter pays for itself almost immediately. (Emphasis mine) This is where the viewpoints differ. Some people spend a lot more time on the exploratory aspect of coding. Others prefer seeing a program or a system to completion. It largely depends on what you work on and where your preferences lie. Years ago I wrote a script that grabs a bunch of stuff from the HN API, does some aggregation and processing, and makes a visualization out of them. I wrote it because the idea hit me on a whim while intoxicated, and I wrote the whole thing while intoxicated. The script works and I still use it frequently. I haven't made any changes to it because it just does what it needs to. It has no types. It's written decently because I've been coding for a long time but I was intoxicated when I wrote it. The important thing is it's still providing value. There's a surprising amount of automation and glue code that doesn't need the correctness of a type system. I've written lots of stuff like this over the years that I use weekly, sometimes daily, that I've never had to revisit because they just work. I suspect it's a matter of personal preference how much time a person spends on that kind of work vs building out large, correct systems. I suspect there's a long tail of quality-of-life tooling that is simple and exploratory in nature much like large, strict systems are much bigger than most people expect at first blush because of how many cases they handle. I think trying to say that one is more common than the other without anything approaching the rigor of at least a computing survey is really just to use your gut to make generalizations. Which is what the strict vs loose typing online debates really are. A popularity contest of what kind of software people like to write given the forum the question is being discussed on.