Why do you need the code to look obviously wrong when you have a compiler capable of telling you that it's wrong? It doesn't require a full-blown IDE to get fas

Why do you need the code to look obviously wrong when you have a compiler capable of telling you that it's wrong? It doesn't require a full-blown IDE to get fast feedback; I use a fairly lightweight vim config that gives me type-checking every time I save a file. I also disagree about overhead. Defining new types is an O(1) cost, and decent modern languages should have type inference so that there isn't a recurring annotation cost either. Even accounting for the cost, if the benefit is 10 units and the cost is 1 unit, saying only that “it's a tradeoff” is a bit absurd. When there are tradeoffs, engineers don't throw up their hands and flip a coin, they calculate the costs and benefits and use the best solution. Types easily win in that calculation. I don't disagree with using notation to fill the gaps when you must work in a weaker language, but we shouldn't pretend that it isn't a weakness.