a = 3 if true: a2 = 4 # lame I know--but beginners like me do it
--Python lets discover your failure at runtime...[as a good dynamic typed language does--Go doesn't FWIW]. It was just from an experience I had with learning Python recently. Now it makes me wonder what his blog post would look like saying things he'd miss going from Go to Python, or "what I wouldn't miss from Python..."
My point was just that although Python is dynamically typed, it is still a compiled-to-bytecode language (much as Java is) and you don't have to discover your errors at runtime, that is optional. You have the ability to perform just the compile step without executing the bytecode. The 'compileall' command does that.
There are also great tools like pylint for static source code checking. And of course unit testing is always key.
But of course, if you are looking to catch typing and variable declaration bugs at compile time, you need to be using a statically typed language.