[throwaway7645]

Is optional typing the same thing as gradual typing in Perl6 as in you can specify types, but don't have to?

[metricodus]

I don't know much about Perl, but this describes Dart's approach to optional typing:

https://www.dartlang.org/articles/language/optional-types

(But meh, it's not really innovative/new as this page says, just not popular.)

Basically, it's a language that allows you to choose the level of type checking. You can be super strict all the time, or only when it matters. Or not at all.

Like all other modern languages it naturally has the basic collection data types built in so that you don't have to reinvent them.