This concept of "programer is generally dumb, so languages must have features to prevent them from making mistakes", with strong typing falling under those feat

This concept of "programer is generally dumb, so languages must have features to prevent them from making mistakes", with strong typing falling under those features, is solely an academic exercise that is taught in academia, and perpetuated by people who just wanna fit the mold in FAANG and other big players. And Python being popular because its basic/beginner oriented is a laughable statement. http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/3/26/7-years-of-youtube-scalability-lessons-in-30-minutes.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/3/26/7-years-of-youtube.... Not to mention that all the bleeding edge ML stuff is Python first. Language adoption directly depends on how quickly people can build stuff in that language, and its an exponential effect, because with speed of development comes more libraries, which in turn allows other people to build stuff that uses those libraries quicker. And the initial speed of development directly depends on the programmer having to manage less things. Static typing, in real world, is often a hinderance because code bases are dynamic, and having to go and refactor code because data definition changed takes time. And if you have competent programmers that write clean code and a good code review and testing framework, static typing gives you no advantage since the time spent fixing issues due to failing tests will be equivalent to spending time fixing issues with failure to compile.