We are talking about static typing, as otherwise Python and Ruby are strongly, dynamically typed.

Also maybe this article should be about type-safety, peek/poke makes Basic unsafe. C, C++ are not quite typesafe as well.

As for "being scared" of statically typed langauges, it depends what is being built, and what is the language in question. Simple things and embedded programming perhaps benefit from C-like static typing becuase of relative simplicity and high standartization of what is being implemented (eg, some well-defined protocol or numeric computations).

Now, if you want to implement more flexible solutions, where the types may well be defined by the users of your software, static typing loses it's appeal. I do not know about you, but I choose mature dynamically typed language over my own ad hoc implementation of dynamic typing in statically typed language anytime (I am not building compilers for living). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule - pretty near.

In another comment I saw Ocaml suggested - that one can alleviate the need to mark your types statically most of the time, but it still does not help with the dynamical part mentioned above.

Also there are languages with type far ahead of C or Rust, where one can capture function type with more precision, and even using dependent types, but I can hardly imaging anything like that will ever be mainstream. See for instance Adam Chlipala's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur_(programming_language) Ur.

As always properties of typing system need to be weighted against what is being built, and not some abstract black and white, love and hate.