Tcl Rule 1: Everything is a string.
Tcl Rule 2: See rule 1.
Tcl Rule 3: Not joking.
Not really. A dict is an unordered set of keys where each key has a value associated with it. If you try to access a dict as a list, you might expect to get a list of key-value pairs or a list of values or possibly a list of keys. And in what order will the elements in the list be?
So you like strong typing. I do too, but I like it even more at compile time. If you're doing without the compile time error checking, why not go all the way and do without type errors at runtime as well? Sounds like a choice between:
1. type errors at compile time,
2. data-dependent type errors at runtime, or
3. data-dependent corruption and/or non-type errors at runtime.
Why? [Other than for performance reasons]
I keep repeating this point in every Tcl thread. Tcl was meant to be used to enable command line shells for programs written in C.
Btw, being able to treat a list as a dict has been useful to me. I (developer) write a routine to be used by a non-developer, who may not be a great programmer. The list notation is easy in Tcl. I can just tell them to make a list with keys and values alternating. And for a one-time conversion cost, I get to use it as a dict.
Also works the other way around: I can return a dict. And if a Blub user is processing it, he's free to ignore my documentation that it's a dict and process it as a list (again for a one-time cost).
YMMV.
Because it becomes very hard to reason with what you have at hand, and in my experience the "helpful" conversions, rather than actually help, mostly hides errors and bugs in the code and delays there effect, making them much harder to diagnose than a stricter handling.
It's kind of a moot point though. Javascript is unstoppable in the extension language space now.
I'm not counting node, because it only exists to run JavaScript. Nor am I counting web browsers, for similar reasons.
Can you give some examples? PDF is the only one I can think of. Most of the existing JavaScript engines seem too heavy-weight to be used as extensions.
Since I'm not in the web-developer bubble, I just don't see JavaScript all that often.
I was generating functions procedurally, and I was having a scoping problem with one of the inner variables. Naturally, the suggested solution was to do a string replace on your newly created function. Seems obvious in retrospect. :)