dynamic-typing

Can someone tell me what Strong typing and weak typing means and which one is better? That'll be the theory answers taken care of, but the practice side seems to have been neglected... Strong-typing means that you can't use one type of variable where another is expected (or have restrictions to doing so). Weak-typing means you can mix different types. In PHP for example, you can mix numbers and strings and PHP won't complain because it is a weakly-typed language. $message = "You are visitor number ".$count; If it was strongly typed, you'd have to convert $count from an integer to a string,

Since python is dynamically typed, of course we can do something like this: def f(x): return 2 if x else "s" But is the way python was actually intended to be used? or in other words, do union types exist in the sense they do in racket for example? Or do we only use them like this: def f(x): if x: return "x" where the only "union" we need is with None? Union typing is only needed when you have a statically typed language, as you need to declare that an object can return one of multiple types (in your case an int or str , or in the other example str or NoneType ). Python deals in objects only,

I saw this small piece of code that is evading my understanding: <?php $a = '0e462097431906509019562988736854'; $b = '0e830400451993494058024219903391'; var_dump($a == $b); Which will output: bool(true) I understand that when using == PHP will attempt fuzzy comparison, silently converting between types in order to perform the comparison. What I'm not understanding is why PHP seems to think these two strings are the same. I would have thought since $a and $b are strings, that no type conversion would need to take place. What am I not understanding? I think this article explains it pretty well:

I see these terms bandied around all over the place in programming and I have a vague notion of what they mean. A search shows me that such things have been asked all over stack overflow in fact. As far as I'm aware Static/Dynamic typing in languages is subtly different to Strong/Weak typing but what that difference is eludes me. Different sources seem to use different meanings or even use the terms interchangeably. I can't find somewhere that talks about both and actually spells out the difference. What would be nice is if someone could please spell this out clearly here for me and the rest