You should not take the 30 years old "type system" you get with C++ or Java as an example of a strict type system. There are much much better ones. Look at ML or Haskel or ... These are general enough that you do not need to bend backwards (ie. typecast) all the time to get anything done.

If Perl6 stole from those, including stuff like type inference, you would not even notice it's suddenly strict. (Well until you'd do something spicy with eval"" of course.)

Jenda