[mark-r]

Forgive me, I was confusing strongly typed with statically typed. My point still stands though, for someone used to a dynamically typed language like Python having database columns that aren't locked to a single rigid type will seem quite natural.

[j-pb]

It doesn't though. There are almost no dynamically typed languages where you supply a type yet don't enforce it, maybe forth is the closest with its stack effect comments. If you give me a type, I do expect a type, if you omit the type fine, I'm gonna assume it'll be dynamic at runtime.

All these dynamic languages are also strongly typed for a reason, even javascript uses === everywhere instead of the weakly typed ==. The bugs that occur because of automagic are just ridiculously hard to track down, and even statically typed languages can fall into this pit, for example Scala with its implicits shudder.

But SQLite does the worst of all worlds, you have to specify a type, yet you cannot rely on it, it sometimes does type conversion for you e.g. int to string and back, and sometimes does not.

They should've just implemented a single ANY type or have the syntax not use types at all and deviate from the SQL spec (which they do a lot anyways).