[iroddis]

It sounds, as you point out, that he is aware of the tendency to typos and has an idea on how to guard against it. I’ve built up a similar portfolio of techniques and best practices to guard against my own shortcomings, and most of the friction I encounter is when the team I work with doesn’t have the same viewpoints on correctness and tests.

Languages like Python are the worst for exacerbating issues. Perl at least would parse the entire codebase and do some validation. Python doesn’t evaluate until runtime, meaning that unless you have 100% test coverage of all functions and branches a typo could cause an issue long after the process started.

As others have mentioned it sounds like you co-worker has good ideas. Adding test coverage, being stricter about configs (don’t ignore known keys, validate structure … as much as people hat XML, DTDs are an amazing help for catching config errors) are all things that will pay off down the road.

Long story short, instead of looking at your coworkers suggestions as a way to guard against their mistakes, take some time to understand that they live in a more chaotic worldview than you do, and have strong experience in dealing with it. Heck, put them in charge of QA processes. They sound like they’ve got the experience, and will feel better when that experience is appreciated.

[tacostakohashi]

Yeah... perl at least ended up with 'use strict;' and 'my', python has nothing :(