"Stringly typed programming" is the phrase I was looking for. It's the equivalent of a shrug from the programming language designer: "I don't know what to do about that, so I'll just add a magic string and let someone else figure it out."

That and one or two other examples in the article smelled vaguely of PHP to me: features piled up in response to immediate needs instead of coherent design. For a language that famously refused to add generics for years (then did them badly, IMHO), it seems off-brand.