[smitty1e]

"Somehow they decided" is rooted in the desire to make typing optional, and absolutely not a requirement.

[setr]

Wouldn't compiler selective enforcement achieve the same goal? It seems to me the difference is that other programs can be implemented to do the typechecking (eg mypy) rather than the compiler doing so itself

[ben-schaaf]

It lets you do things like `functools.singledispatchmethod`.