Weakly typed languages are like that, once you start practicing programming as a team sport, the type system is your friend. Another factor usually ignored, is

Weakly typed languages are like that, once you start practicing programming as a team sport, the type system is your friend. Another factor usually ignored, is that when coding as a team, code is read way more often than written/modified. The success of a language has a lot to do on how easy it is to read code written by others, but without making readability too cumbersome to write for (e.g. AppleScript is easy to read, but hard to write). Too much flexibility hampers understanding. It's a balancing act, and in the end, a popularity contest. The most widely used languages are likely best for most projects. There's a reason why they are successful.