alt Hacker NewsIf you mean type aliases, that's a good idea within a single codebase, but the distinction between different types of strings doesn't survive serialization so it wouldn't have prevented this error. What they need is a way to signal errors out-of-band, like Result<T> or exceptions.
In python, aliases are separate from typing.NewType, but you're right: it's only enforced within a codebase and then only if the dev cares to run the typechecker.
So yeah, I guess it either needs to happen at runtime, or we just do signaling and user data on separate file descriptors.