[arc619]

In other words, in Python you have to rely on your colleagues manually writing documentation, and if they don't you're out of luck and they're 'bad developers' and potentially the whole product is affected.

In static languages this simply isn't a problem. Types are checked for consistency at compile time and you don't have to rely on people toiling on this busy work.

Not to say documentation isn't necessary, or good, but isn't something you need to create working programs because otherwise no one knows wtf any variable is without running the program.

[vanusa]

No, actually I advocate static typing approaches for precisely the reasons you give. As does Python, since years and years ago.

I'm just saying that core problem it solves -- "bad developers" -- is going bite you no matter what (if not addressed at the source). And that supposed magical efficacy of measures designed to protect against it is somewhat overstated.

[prewett]

What I've found is even worse: on medium-size personal projects I inevitably pass the wrong type to a function (or refactor and forget to change a call somewhere). Generally it does not fail until somewhere else, which relies on it being a certain type. So even though I know what my functions should take, I still spend a bunch of time tracking down the problems, which involves a printing out a lot of stuff because the error happened outside the current call stack. This is something a static type system would just prevent for me, and I've basically decided that anything beyond really simple stuff is actually faster for me to write in a statically typed language. (Examples in the past are a parser for a static site generator with a mostly Turing-complete language, and 3D model generators)