> Honestly, by trusting that those objects conform to what things are documented to expect and using operations that will naturally raise an error for unexpecte

> Honestly, by trusting that those objects conform to what things are documented to expect and using operations that will naturally raise an error for unexpected cases. Which is really hit or miss in the wild. Even the standard library documentation doesn't reliably document types. There are abundant references to "file-like objects" as though that is a type. It is (or at least was) totally unclear if a "file-like object" supports seek() or just read() and write(). Our internal Python code is a mess as well; we can't keep documentation up to date with function signatures (even though it's part of our code review process). As someone who develops primarily in Python, I think you're missing out on quite a lot if you think C++ is a good characterization of the state of static typing. Having used Python and Go and a few other languages, I'm convinced that static typing is more productive when it's done well.