[12thwonder]

good point. Yes, during prototype phase, rigid typing actually helps quite a bit. I still do that myself, simply because I don't have to "run" the program to see if I'm on the right path when I'm just sketching things out.

I guess what I wanted to say is that, in the long run, compile-time checks may become runtime checks, especially something like enum values where at the beginning, enums are fine choice but soon you will find yourself where you have to store that to a DB etc.

Problem is, moving from compile-time check to runtime check isn't that straightforward in a lot of cases.