In my opinion weak typing is an unusual quirk, but there's no way to get around that. I really wonder kind of reasons could be given to defend it; I don't think a strongly typed language like Python is any harder because of its types.
I tend to agree, these days where possible when working in PHP I try not to rely on PHPs magic type conversions behind the scenes for things like comparisons.
You can't really avoid weak typing; e.g., making a mistake in a strongly typed language would raise an error, whereas in a weakly typed language it can silently screw up everything.
