Yesterday I was hacking trying to hack away some code in Java when I realized there was something wrong…
Something was trying to stop me from being productive!
In one case I wrote some code which turned red on me the moment I stopped typing it… The reason was obvious: the exceptions! We can’t have those exceptions running around! 
So… ok IDE! Go ahead and add the try/catch for me. Errors: gone.
Then after a bit I rewrote the code and removed the Exception-throwing part. To my surprised: errors! Wtf?
Unreachable catch exception for WtfException. This exception is never thrown from the try statement body.
Cool… so that means I have some junk code lying around. Fine by me!
Not so fine by java… I had to fix the “error” before continuing, which took away the remaining hacking flow I had. What was I really doing before my IDE decided to interrupted me? Beats me… 
A while ago I read that after a distraction a person needs 8 minutos to concentrate again. If that is so then it’s possible that Java and other compiled languages might be working against programmers. They might help you write more thorough code. But that will be at the expense of loosing the big picture. While you hack away you are constantly brought down to the “current-error” in front of you level.
In the last few weeks I’ve been working more intensely with php and I’ve come to love it’s hackability (or could it be… its documentation?). For instance, I knew nothing about php’s XPath support but php was fine with that. It would let me write shitty code anyway until I got to where I wanted. I could experiment for hours without having a single negative feedback other that my own reprimands for not getting it right! Yesterday’s attempt was a completely different story. For the first time in that project’s lifespan I “felt bad” while working in it. Yuck! 
And now for something (not) completely different!
I don’t know if you’ve read “7 Thinking Hats” - you should by the way - but I couldn’t help but connecting yesterday’s experience to being in the same room with someone wearing a black hat, someone who kept interrupting any green or yellow ideas you might had.
What about your favourite language? Does it have “nag the developer whenever we does something wrong” in it’s feature list?
If only there was a (development) mode to run code in which all exceptions were treated as RuntimeExceptions..
bte, what is the seventh hat for?..
Humm… “development mode”. I’ll look into it.
lol… 6 Thinking Hats. I don’t know where the 7th one came from but we never know when we might need an extra hat.