At the same time, it is not impossible to write a large program entirely in assembly language, it just requires extreme discipline, even more so than python.

It's just a question of degree.

But when you DO get a type problem, and in any sizable code base, you WILL, it only manifests AT RUNTIME, and possibly at a customer site or in production, rather than manifesting at compile time.

Case in point, I had written an apartment search website in Perl. Now, at this point I had been pretty disenchanted with Perl as a whole due to the "there's more than one way to do it" culture combining with the "executable line noise" syntax to give rise to a lot of very impenetrable write-once, read-never-again code from others. So, when I did this, I used real, appropriately-named variables, eschewing the convenience of $_, and I made sure each line of code did one thing and only one thing if at all possible. I did not pack a lot into a line. Each line should be obvious. Where I felt that it might be subject to interpretation, I added comments as to what I was doing and why. Each function had is own comment section which discussed what it was for and why, possible room for improvement, and so on.

Eventually the duty passed to another set of hands, a bunch of students who had never seen Perl (the rise of PHP was strong at that point) and in the follow-up, they mentioned that they found it very straightforward to simply re-write each line.

I heard back in the past few months about one of those very large projects I did in a previous job, just keeping touch with people. I asked about one of my personal pet projects. "No, it just keeps running." "It's very obvious where to make any changes." All Python. No type stuff.

I just don't see what I am missing.