A lot of the "strong typeing is good!" comes out from people who use (by choice) langauges that are more acurately called "static" (i.e., the types are determined at compile time), not "strong". Any language with a type system like Pascal's falls into this category (including C and Java).

However, most of these people don't realize what a real strong type system looks like (for starters, real type systems don't need int/float/etc. declarations). There are languages with weaker type systems (like TCL, where everything is a string weather you like it or not), but C and Java are actually pretty far down on the list in regards to the strength of their type system.

You are correct to say that the strength of the type system is not a binary proposition, but rather a ranking. I assert that Perl's type system is overall stronger than C's or Java's, even if it's limited in the number of types it has. OTOH, it's significantly weaker than OCaml or Haskell.

"There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.

In reply to Re^4: "strong typing" is potentially ambiguous by hardburn
in thread (Completely OT) - Hero(i)n programming language on Slashdot by dragonchild

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