It's not "bad" design. It's "bad" only theoretically and just
different
from strongly-typed languages. I like its "inconsistent" function names
- for a lot of functions they're similar to C and in most cases they're
very easy to remember, as opposed to some other languages, including
python (!!).
Of course there are some nuances, but they're in any language. And I
personally think "10" is semantically equal to 10 in most cases, so
comparison is not a problem, either. You just need to be slightly more
accurate while writing things.
And my main idea is that only a statically typed should try to be
strict. And python very oddly tries to be strict in some places while
being dynamically typed. Look, it doesn't concatenate string and long -
even Java does that!