yeah, most times its solved by side-stepping the strict type system and making an exception for debug prints. but this is not a real practical solution, this is a stupid workaround born from overinsistence on "beautiful" design choices.

It seems to me like a pragmatic compromise and very much a real solution. What would you consider a real solution that isn’t overinsisting on beautiful design choices?

putting strong static type system into optional compiler pass. yes, I know this may be null is some cases, let me run my program for now, I know what I am doing. yes, there are unhandled effects or wrong signature, just let me run my test. yes, that type is too generic, i will fix it later, let me run my god damn program.

This puts a lot of extra conditions on the runtime; you basically have to implement a "dynamically typed" runtime like Javascript. In doing so you lose a lot of performance. Google have invested something like a century of man-hours into V8 and on typical benchmarks the performance is about half of Java's, which in turn is typically about half of C / Rust's performance. That's a pretty big compromise for some.

Well, you can reuse all that man-hours that went into the JVM - this is what Flix does!