John Backus, who can hardly be considered lesser than any of the others on this cherry-picked list, used his Turing Award lecture to rally for functional programming:
B. Expressive type systems, all the way to compile-time metaprogramming and dependently typed proofs.
Writing programs in style A. is tremendously valuable. Expending too much effort in the fine points of the type system, which invariably is simultaneously both under-expressive and over-expressive, is a complete waste of time. Some critical projects require high defect-free confidence, and for those it's legitimate to go full in formal proofs and take the 10x-100x productivity slowdown. For mere mortals, documenting the structure of the data (json) manipulated by the respective functions suffices.
John Backus, who can hardly be considered lesser than any of the others on this cherry-picked list, used his Turing Award lecture to rally for functional programming:
http://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/backus_turingaward_l...