Which would be fine if I only ever used "+" with literals. But normally, I write things like

x + y

where x and y are values I got from who knows where. Javascript shouldn't pretend to figure out what I mean by this, because in many cases, I'm talking gibberish, and all I have is a bug.

I'd rather not talk about this stuff in terms of "types." It's about assertions, and Python makes them early and throws the exceptions early. It's a defensive practice that you can emulate in any language, and your assertions can be much richer than anything that is typically thought of as a type.

I'm definitely a fan of Python's strategy. It's much better at detecting bugs early and often. That, and there's a distinction in Python between identity and equality, with the `is` and `==` operators respectively.

Frankly, I think Perl has the best approach to this specific problem. We all want to do some string concatenation. We all want to render some non-string values as strings sometimes. So:

    1 + 0 = 1
    1 . 0 = 10

Just stop using + to concatenate strings.