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Comment by czardoz | Hacker News Reader

> In strongly-typed languages there's a stronger focus on parsing the JSON instead

I think you mean _statically_ typed languages here. Python is a strongly typed language.

The definition of "strongly-typed" that Python conforms to is a useless one, because very few weakly-typed languages exist anymore, and even those are only very, very partially "weakly typed" by having operators that are defined to do automatic coercion, generally only between strings and numbers, which isn't even the way the original "weakly typed" was meant. The only truly "weakly typed" language I know of that is still extant is assembler/machine language, which can never really go away, where all you ever have are numbers, and thus absolutely nothing stops you from adding a string pointer to the first element of some structure. (Modulo some distinctions that still may exist between floats and integers and such... even assembler isn't as weak as it used to be, though it is still by no means a strongly-typed language.)

So I don't use the useless definition. By any useful definition of strong vs. weak typing, that is, one that actually creates two or more non-empty, non-trivial sets of members in the universe of discourse, Python is a weakly-typed language.

You can use whatever definition you want in your own head, but you cannot expect anyone else to accept it.

Furthermore, one of the most popular languages in use today is weakly typed: JavaScript!

Here's a plausible definition: Strongly typed languages disallow programs to escape the type system (e.g. put an integer into into memory, then treat it as a float, or vice versa, as in the famous Quake fast-inverse-sqrt hack.). Oh, look, Python is strongly-typed and C is weakly-typed.

Note that I do not endorse using "strongly-typed" to mean this definition, or any other. There are no useful definitions of this phrase, don't use it, except when correcting people.

I guess you need a term for "typing of moderate strength"

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