Not the OP, but usually, when people talk about type safety, they're referring to some flavor of static typing, not strong typing. Very few languages still in

Not the OP, but usually, when people talk about type safety, they're referring to some flavor of static typing, not strong typing. Very few languages still in use in the modern era are still weakly-typed. My personal take is that while a lot of type systems can be overblown, nil-punning is not a sufficient substitute for optional/maybe types.