Are the critiques in "All the things I hate about Python" valid?

[Richard Damon]

On 2/18/18 6:55 AM, Anders Wegge Keller wrote:
> På Sat, 17 Feb 2018 15:05:34 +1100
> Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> skrev:
>> boB Stepp <robertvstepp at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> He blithely conflates “weakly typed” (Python objects are not weakly, but
>> very strongly typed)
>   Python is more strongly typed than PHP, but that doesn't really say much.
> However, compared to a language like C, there are big holes in the type
> safety.
>
>      >>> alist = [1, 'two', ('three', four), 5*'#']
>
>   That list is not only weakly typed, but rather untyped. There are no
> safeguards in the language, that enforce that all elements in a list or
> other container are in fact of the same type. Before type annotations and
> mypy, I could not enforce that other than at runtime.
>
>   So claiming Python to have very strongly typed objects is a bit of a
> strecth. PHP that many of us like to be smug about is equally strongly
> typed. It just comes with a metric ton of inane type coersions that have
> gone too far. However, we are happy to add an integer to a float without
> having to make an explicit conversion every time, so ... Thread carefull and
> all that.
>
Note, that 'Only at Runtime' isn't a distinction between Weakly Typed or 
Strongly Typed but between Statically Typed and Dynamically Typed.

Python is clearly dynamically typed, as we don't need to assign a type 
to a symbol, and it will always reflect a value of that type,

Python is much stronger typed than PHP, because in PHP you can do things 
like 1 + '2' and get 3, as string values will naturally convert 
themselves to numbers, Python won't do this. Yes Python will freely 
convert between numeric types, but I wouldn't say that Python claims to 
be a language that focuses on numerics.

-- 
Richard Damon