I'd take the point about literals a half-step further. It's really nice to be able to throw a string at a function and have that function compare it to a literal value using == instead of strcmp - and oh yeah, someone was just about to reply saying I should always use strncmp for extra productivity loss. Or I can throw a list/dict of any random type around without lots of ceremony. Do I lose type checking? Sure. Then again, those "expected int, got unsigned int" warnings aren't very helpful sometimes. "Must compile without warnings" is a good idea for long-term maintainability of long-term code, but when you're writing a simple script or still experimenting with an algorithm that crap just gets in the way. A minute or two defining and aligning types might not seem to much, but when you have to do it ten times in the course of what was only a one-hour task to begin with it's a pretty significant hit.