Fun vs. Computer Science (2016)
I feel like this is a false dichotomy: you can have a fast iteration cycle, and have statically checked guarantees. I've worked in Haskell for 7 years and had exactly this. I could load my entire app in GHCi, make changes, reload and test. Now I'm working in Java and in IntelliJ I can have something similar with hot-swap. And in the browser with typescript I have a strong type-system and can reload my app in seconds.I agree that it's easy to build a slow, batch based build system and just tell people that's how it is. Fast iteration is important and requires effort to keep working. It might even be more important than a static type system, at least for some apps. But you can have both.