The rest of the points are silly rehashes of arguments as old as Emacs v vim, but sure, let's go there too. We've done empirical research to see if this matters

The rest of the points are silly rehashes of arguments as old as Emacs v vim, but sure, let's go there too. We've done empirical research to see if this matters. Charitably, the results are "inconclusive"[0]. > The first glaring issue is that I have no guarantee that is_valid() returns a bool type. You can name functions ridiculous, unhelpful and misleading things in any language. The very fact that you know to expect a bool undermines the point: clearly, despite not having static types, a human managed to make a pretty reasonable assumption about what a piece of code was about to do. Just because the compiler can check that is_valid returns a string doesn't mean that hat's magically a useful thing to do. > The fact that I cannot, in the absence of perfect test coverage, verify the syntactical correctness of someone’s code is a big red flag. Syntax errors are caught by the compiler. Semantic errors aren't caught by the best type systems. At best, type systems are a way to encode a bit of the semantics so that the compiler can prove things about it. > To improve static type checking in Python, developers made libraries like jedi, pytype, mypy, and toasted-marshmallow, but they are often not used in most projects because they do not belong to the standard toolchain I can not imagine the author actually used jedi and believes this. That's... not how jedi works. I also don't know what to do with the argument of "oh, you have an optional static type system but people don't use it because it's annoying, this is why we should use a mandatory static type system" other than shrug. I like types! I think there are great arguments for types. I like the idea of being able to have a type system prove that certain bugs can't happen. This adds nothing but FUD and no new insights. [0]: https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/ https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/