It is an argument for failing fast in general. Static typing isn't guaranteed to pick up every mistake at its origin, because far from every mistake is of the "

It is an argument for failing fast in general. Static typing isn't guaranteed to pick up every mistake at its origin, because far from every mistake is of the "int rather than string" variety. Since you have brought up the general case, the origins of many bugs involve something sophisticated going wrong which would require you to encode much of your program (hopefully not too redundantly) into a Turing-complete type system. Rather than stuffing square pegs into round holes, you could just write the appropriate error handling code (or even just asserts).