Statisticians and researchers, is this helpful?
IME with both Python and JS/TS, it helps a lot (which is different than completely solving the problem), for reasons which should generalize to other typing add-ons/supersets for untyped languages. Typing your code forces validations at the boundaries, which obviously doesn't stop upstream sources from messing with formats but it does mean that you are much more likely to catch it at the boundary rather than having weird breakages deep in your code that you have to trace back to bad upstream data.
eg. `type DateString = ${number}/${number}/${number}`
A super naïve check for using "/" instead of "-" as the separator character for a date formatted as a string. If a date is provided with some other separator character it will throw an error. If my function takes a DateString the string must be formatted correctly to pass the type check. Obviously this isn't enough (YYYY/MM/DD is different than DD/MM/YYYY) but the intention was to show a way to enforce something via types rather than validating a string to check that your have a DateString you can simply enforce that you have one.
The idea is that checking should be the only way of making a value of the type. That prevents you from forgetting to check when you turn some broader type (say, string) into the more narrow one (date, in this case).
Yeah, of course you can cheat the typechecking in the code at the boundary in several ways, or convert from wire format to internal types in a way which plugs in type-valid defaults for bad data rather than erroring, or just use too-broad internal types to start with (you can have "stringly-typed code"), and fail to help the problems. But if you use the types that make sense internally for what the code is doing, than conversion including validation at the boundary becomes the path of least resistance in most cases. "Forces" is not strictly true, but my experience is that adding types does create a strong push for boundary validation.
reticulate works for going in the other direction: https://rstudio.github.io/reticulate/
With the good interoperability these days, let's stop rewriting functionality in other languages. If the interoperability is no good, work on fixing that, please.