Does Python really follow its philosophy of "Readability counts"?

[Paul Rubin]

r <rt8396 at gmail.com> writes:
> You said you wrote this program in 15 min. How much testing did you
> actually do on this data before running it? If you told me you spent
> more than 15 minutes i would not believe you. 

I would say hours, in the sense that the program ran correctly for
that long, processing several GB's of data before hitting something
obscure that it couldn't handle.  This is not a single incident, it's
something that happens all the time; write the program, run it til it
crashes, fix what made it crash, run some more, etc.  In some cases
where the program is a background process listening to external
events, it runs for weeks before hitting something it can't handle.

To be fair, that kind of thing is notoriously difficult to make
airtight in real world systems, which is why Erlang uses a "let it
crash" philosophy that emphasizes recovery from failures rather than
trying to avoid them at all costs.  But, at least in the stuff I'm
hacking, I think a lot of these errors could be avoided with more
automated ways to check for type consistency.