[teddyh]

Summarizing quote:

“Python type hints are a core part of the language, they even have standard library modules (typing), and yet they don’t do anything when used in that language without some external tooling.

That, to me, is a bit of an expectations mismatch.”

I.e. they’re complaining that a type checker like mypy isn’t run by default.

[empath-nirvana]

I think it's a reasonable complaint and I think that there should be some "strict" annotation that forces python to do that type checking before running the code, which should be completely backwards compatible.

Let's think of this in a deploy environment like kubernetes -- if you don't have such a check, then you could deploy code that fails _at runtime_, causing an outage, because someone made a mistake with types.

If you fail _at startup_, then the deploy will never go healthy and will fail, leaving the old pods still running, causing no interruption in service.

And yes you _should_ have this check in CI, but there's no reason not to have defense in depth.

[miohtama]

It's also good to note that all popular editors and IDEs like Visual Studio Code and PyCharm support type hints quite well by default. Some external tooling needed, but it's your editor and you are going to have any case.

[pphysch]

I was a bit surprised when I was diving into the Django type hints and realized that it was VSCode, not Django library, supplying some of the types via a "stubs" feature that includes extra type support for popular libraries like Django and pandas, the latter of which wasn't even installed on my system.

[olejorgenb]

PyCharm unfortunately does not supports type hints fully. It certainly utilize the hints, but there's a bunch of things it simply does not understand which make hinting much less useful when using PyCharm.

[d0mine]

Could you provide an example?

[nickm12]

Yup, this is the summary of the article. I can't say that I disagree, but in practice typechecking for Python was never going to happen if it had to go out as part of the CPython interpreter. Mypy was able to develop on its own terms, outside of the burden it would have if it had to support the entire Python ecosystem as part of a Python release.

Also, the comparison to typescript is not quite fair because you can't run Typescript in your browser; you have to set up a proper build system. You can do the same thing for Python and make typechecking (and linting and code formatting) part of your build and you get the exact same benefits.

[wodenokoto]

Not so much that it’s is t run by default but that it doesn’t even exist by default, was my reading of the article