[oselhn]

I tried to use type hints but I do not see enough value in them to justify making code more complex. It looks to me that they are similar to hungarian notation as they make refactoring harder but they are not reliable and does provide little value in checking program correctness. They are just documentation embedded into variable declaration used only for linting so I tend to not trust them.

[feanaro]

Why do you say they are not reliable? Are you unfamiliar with mypy?

[oselhn]

Because it is not used by runtime. Mypy is just linter which adds additional restrictions on code which are not enforced by interpreter. You can have false positives so correct python code must be fixed to pass linter checks. In my opinion if you need static type checks you should use statically typed language and not hurt your coding speed by such partial solution. Also majority of python libraries do not use type annotations so you are limited to your code.

[feanaro]

Well, yes, this is exactly how the type checkers of statically-typed languages work: as linters, during compilation. The largest difference is that typing in Python is gradual, so not everything needs to be typed as you say.

I agree that statically typed languages are preferable. I don't consider static typing optional so I'm glad Python is growing a solution that supports it, though.

In my experience, mypy works surprisingly well. It doesn't hurt my coding speed at all but enhances it to levels that were not previously possible in Python, due to a lack of typing. False positives are rather rare.

[baq]

don't use them if you don't validate them with mypy or similar.