&gt; I just figure, everything is coming in as a string no matter what. It&#x27;s going back out as a string.<p>Maybe so, but that only accurately describes things at the boundaries of your system. Your database tables still have columns that hold integers, dates, or floats. Sure, you could do the type coercions as needed, but at that point you&#x27;re missing out on the valuable opportunity to validate your data as it enters the system. You can provide meaningful errors to users as early as possible, you can avoid defensive checks nearly everywhere else within your code, and you can just generally trust that invariants about your data are going to hold throughout the rest of your program.<p>This leads to smaller test suites, more concise codebases, and higher security assurances overall. If you look at the sorts of vulnerabilities that often pop up in Rails for example, many of them simply don&#x27;t affect you if you use something like Virtus [0] to validate the types of your data as it enters the system.<p>I don&#x27;t do much web development, but statically typed web development is the only way I&#x27;ve ever been able to tolerate it.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;solnic&#x2F;virtus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;solnic&#x2F;virtus</a>