What exactly is it that saves time? Is it to not have to type as much? In my experience if you use a lang with good type inference you type a lot less with strict typing than without, since you don't have to have unit tests to guard for things like typos/param order/param types.
Static types save time later by giving you the opportunity to do a lot of refactoring with high assurance of correctness. Unit tests bring back some of this ability to dynamic languages but they require extra time to write and maintain the tests.
(Of course, I think text-only Unix tools as a way of interacting with a computer is a fundamentally broken idea). Powershell is an interesting idea, though maybe not the best implementation of that idea.
Everything sharing a common representation does not make types less useful. I would rather my program crash then confuse Bid and Ask prices.
"And for interactive scripring, compilation feels a bit strange too."
I wonder if you've used a REPL for a typed language. I agree that peeling out a compilation step would be odd, but adding types doesn't actually have to change the interaction that much.
Well,
precoding :: Int -> Int -> Int -> (Int, Int) -> Precoding
rsa_dp :: Integer -> Integer -> Integer -> Either RSAError Integer
compile :: String -> String -> String -> Map Name Interface
-> Either String (Interface, String)
This debate never ends because, like the static vs dynamic types debate, it ignores the main tradeoff in favour of a one-size-fits-all solution. In both debates (separation and types) the tradeoff can be expressed most generally as an up-front vs deferred time investment. Static types require more up-front time investment with the advantage that they save time later. The same goes for having separated content from presentation.
Now, in light of the tradeoffs above what is the appropriate choice to make? That depends on how much time you're going to spend writing the script/document/whatever and how much time you're going to spend running/maintaining it later. For scripts, it makes no sense to have a heavyweight type system if you're only going to run the thing once and throw it away. Likewise, for documents it makes no sense to put in the extra time planning all the styles if you're only going to make a document (say, a shopping list) and then throw it away. For a long-term document such as a book or a thesis it makes a ton of sense to use something like TeX.