On the fact that types are useful to learning programming, I cannot agree more. I often hear php and javascript labelled as good for beginners, and I did start programming in those (I had no formal CS training and am not a programmer). I wrote crappy code for years before I started using VBA and discovered the benefit of setting option explicit on, and suddenly the IDE provided helpful feedback, objects became self discoverable. And that’s when I started to improve and moved to more sophisticated languages.