Those help you more if you do a lot of math involving both them, but that’s also when it becomes a nightmare in most programming languages because of an explosion in the number of types.
Let’s say your code computes
3km × 4hours
In many languages, you also have to write code to make that happen, and to make it have the same type as
4hours × 3km
And that’s ignoring that you may
- encounter minutes, meters, yards, etc.
- want to use algorithms that compute exp(3km) or log(4hours). What types do these have? Here, you probably want to forget about string typing values.
The good thing about stricter typing systems is that it forces you to handle all the cases when you're doing a refactor like this before it compiles.
When changes to the data model happen in large codebases of dynamic code, it frequently gets shipped in a non complete state and turns into a production runtime error later down the line.
Many years ago I thought that it's a good idea for a game math library to have separate strong types for 'point' (a location in 3D space) and 'vector' (a direction and magnitude in 3D space), and allow/disallow certain operations (e.g. 'point + vector => point' 'vector + vector => vector', 'point - point => vector', while 'point + point' is illegal).
Sounds absolutely great in theory, but in practice it was a royal PITA to work with, but it took me much too long to realize this (how can it be such a hassle when in theory it's such a good idea!)
I soon went back to a general 4D vector class (where a 'point' is defined by .w = 1.0, and a 'vector' by .w = 0.0), and some debug-mode runtime validation (which catches things like trying to add a point to a point).
Of course strong typing also often makes perfect sense, for instance in a 3D rendering API it should be a compilation error to provide a texture-handle where a buffer-handle is expected, but after this experience with points vs vectors (which should've been a classic showcase for strong typing) I would never again "die on that hill" :)
TL;DR: static typing: yes! strong typing: it depends.