Yeah, it's pretty common to think of types as "representational", and that really doesn't get at most of what they are good for. Even in C you can get some goo

Yeah, it's pretty common to think of types as "representational", and that really doesn't get at most of what they are good for. Even in C you can get some good help from the type checker if you know how to use it. For instance, see https://dlthomas.github.io/using-c-types-talk/slides/slides.html#26.0 https://dlthomas.github.io/using-c-types-talk/slides/slides.... for a technique that can turn a flakey segfault from misuse of an API into a compile time error (later slides do just that for a simple SDL program, with a modified header file).