[ionrock]

Honestly, I program in Python every day and my biggest complaint is that duck typing and dynamic types as a paradigm is not well suited for large projects (like the ones I work on). When the codebase is larger than you can keep in your head, the types become a huge issue. When a bug is at one level of an application you have to figure out what argument was passed in. In a language like Java or C#, it is trivial to follow the trail of objects. In Python, it is cumbersome to say the least. Likewise, if you do adopt duck typing you will eventually find that there is no way around dispatching via types at some point. Again, it is not that huge of a deal, but it ends up being boilerplate-ish code you don't want to write.

Tests are effectively the answer, but they are a pain to write and having to document your type information via tests seems a lot more cumbersome from just doing "int my_var".

The party line with Python and dynamic typing is true in many cases, especially when starting a new project. As time goes on though, things get confusing and tests are rarely good enough to offer the same contract static typing offers. To say "you're doing it wrong" is somewhat correct, but no one does it right all the time.

[japherwocky]

protip: the next time you need to quickly find the type of a variable, insert a trace like:

import pdb;pdb.set_trace()

then run the program, and you'll get an interactive prompt and you can just look at everything in that state.

dir( myBuggyVariable)