What I've found in discussing these topics with some colleagues are that the terms "strong typing" and "weak typing" are so vague that almost everyone has a dif

What I've found in discussing these topics with some colleagues are that the terms "strong typing" and "weak typing" are so vague that almost everyone has a different definition. The academic literature uses types to mean checked at compile-time, and tags to mean checked at runtime. Python, calls them types but checks at runtime. I think the fuzzy terminology can work as long as we all declare in advance what we mean. :) In general, I agree with your points. Where strong type systems start to help a lot is when you have super-complicated data flows and invariants, where many different types might actually have the same representation (say, a 32-bit integer or small string), but only some operations are valid on some types. That stuff gets tricky in Python, even if you implement a unique class per type.