This is very much not the kind of bug that the parent was talking about. He's talking about stuff like passing an int value to a (supposedly) string parameter.

This is very much not the kind of bug that the parent was talking about. He's talking about stuff like passing an int value to a (supposedly) string parameter. Basic type stuff. I also agree, as years ago I wrote a large amount of javascript which had type assertions pretty much everywhere. They didn't take long to write but I'm very glad I did them, and I'd rather have the language do it to save me time, clutter and maintenance. Lax typing is a real cost. I've been working on some SQL I inherited and even SQL's not-too-bad typing allowed the original coder to mix types where I wouldn't, and create potential runtime errors eg. to assign the contents of a 64-bit integer field to an 32-bit integer field. That's legal and gives no warning. It's also suddenly a runtime error when it exceeds 2^31 (and there are other possible consequences such as screwing up the optimiser). I'd much rather it forced me to match types exactly, or explicitly cast.