I don't think that illustrates that promotion of the type system as a useful tool is an "empty platitude". A well constructed syntax is certainly a nice feature of a programming language. One might say a language like brainfuck does not have a syntax which makes the code easily readable, and therefore is the worse for it.

Similarly, one might say that a strong type system is a useful tool. That doesn't make it a panacea (and I don't think that this was the claim), but that doesn't mean one can't appreciate it as a good tool.

The problem with this comparison is that readable syntax is a subjective notion, whereas type system is an objective thing that can be evaluated based on its strictly defined boundaries - it's either possible or impossible to encode all required software specification with a provided type system, and if something is not possible, we know exactly what are these things that don't fit into the type system, and therefore we cannot rely on the compiler to prove their correctness.

Er, the difference here is that we're given the Python code for `getUsers` but not the Haskell code for it. That makes the error in Python obvious. The incorrect `userCount` in Python looks just as obviously correct as the incorrect `userCount` in Haskell; and conversely, if we were given the code for the Haskell `getUsers` (or even just the type signature!) the error would be just as easy to spot.

I didn't intend to make this into a competition between Haskell and Python.