Heh. I’d counterargue by asking how many times you’ve heard of someone joining a new job and looking at the code and saying, “Ah, this is clearly written by responsible adults!”

Don't be cynical; I've definitely looked for work in companies that have good codebases.

> I like to think of python as a language that’s great for responsible adults.

Not a disagreement, but an observation : verbatim the exact same thing has been said about Ruby, and - I imagine - every other widely used dynamically typed language on the planet.

IMO, maintainability is a well understood weakness of dynamic typing - hence every responsible Ruby/Python/JS/Perl codebase including a mountain of unit tests that do nothing but cover typing (in addition to the rest of the tests that would be present irrespective of implementation language)

At the end of the day there's no silver bullet : either we let the compiler handle type checking, or we cover it ourselves with unit tests. Doing neither isn't really much of an option, but it is probably where a lot of these type-related bugs come from.

You also have to unfailingly keep comments up to date. Our org struggles a lot with this, but I wouldn’t say we are irresponsible apart from the fact that we’re using a language that makes humans do error-prone tasks that are already solved by automation. :)