I say "had a proper type system", but actually it turns out that it does have something like that: When I use python for anything else than a most tiny script now, I use "mypy"[1] which implements static typing according to some existing Python standard (whether that came about because of mypy or the other way around, I don't know).
It is so, so good to have mypy telling me where I messed up my code instead of receiving a cryptic, weird runtime error, or worse, no error and erratic runtime behavior. Because not knowing that a particular type is unexpected and wrong, values often get passed along and even manipulated until the resulting failure is not very indicative of the actual problem anymore.
