Question

I come from a statically/strongly typed language background (java), and I recently started to learn python and I think I see the value of dynamic/strongly typed language.

Now I’m wondering whether weak typing can be ever desirable.

Going through stackoverflow, I only found explanations that say it has performance benefits. Since the weight of such performance benefit are declining in today’s programming world, is weak typing practically dead? For example, would any good language designer in the future consider making his/her language weak-typed?

If so, why?

Answer 1

Weak typing is primarily useful in low-level programming. A function to read an integer or string off a disk, for example, will have to take a sequence of bytes and come up with an integer or string. That’s much harder to do with strong typing.