As we work on ever bigger systems, we'll need all the debugging help we can get, and type systems sure would come in handy, but there's just one issue with that: I think that static type systems, and type inference as implemented in languages like Haskell won't work so well with such a model. The statically typed approach would probably involve making all of your code changes, changing the schema declarations, running some kind of type inference algorithm, verifying that everything checked, and then running some sort of "commit" that recompiles the needed code on the remote machine and translates your records to the new format, probably interrupting the program while this is happening (and who knows how long this might take, could be hours).