Well that is an odd analogy. ;-) But I know this strange desire of drawing parallels between natural languages and programming languages (or IT/CS) while learni

Well that is an odd analogy. ;-) But I know this strange desire of drawing parallels between natural languages and programming languages (or IT/CS) while learning. I wouldn't call it strong typing though since that would mean we only have 12 classes/types (4 cases 3 genders), not even considering some of these combinations map to the same article. I think a better analogy would be error correction. It adds some redundancy to the information so it's easier to recover the message when transferred over a noisy channel, since at least for simple sentences you could even omit all articles in either language and still understand. For German that leads to trouble as soon as you make use of its rather flexible grammar (i.e. SVO vs OVS). Speaking of weird CS analogies: you could say that tonal languages like Chinese use QAM for higher information density while we only use FM. :-)