5 ms·

Personal opinion here but I’d put TypeScript in the S-tier for “static typing overall enjoyable-ness,” Java in D-tier and it pains me to say Python in F-tier.

th0ma5 3y ago
Are those tiers good or bad? What is the order?
- treflop 3y ago
  See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_list https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_list
- bmacho 3y ago
  SABCDEF descending
  - th0ma5 3y ago
    Why not different letters this seems to go unanswered
MrJohz 3y ago
Yeah, I've recently removed type checking in a Python project because it was causing more false positives than true positives, and working around the type checker's complaints was just getting too tedious. I'm a big fan of type checking in general, and Typescript is a great example of a type checker that allows you to statically define all the dynamic idioms that you'd normally use. But for various reasons, that just doesn't seem to have happened in the Python ecosystem. Instead, you can either write normal dynamic Python without types, or you can restrict yourself to a vaguely Java-like subset of Python with hard-to-use generics and confusing rules about forward references. I wonder if it would have been better to have taken the Typescript approach and have Mypy and all its annotations developed as a separate language, rather than as part of the Python language, with the expectation that they could eventually be merged at some point. As it is, it feels like both sides have been very constrained: Mypy has struggled to innovate on expressive type-level syntax because it only operates on standard Python code, and Python has struggled with balancing the various goals that different groups have for youry annotations. The result is a kind of mess where it's still painful to type basic things like generics (yes, that's changing, but not if you need to support older Python versions), but you also have weird syntax that requires type annotations, even if they're meaningless (like with dataclasses).
- jowf8fa9sdf 3y ago
  Have you tried pyright? I find it way better than mypy.
  - MrJohz 3y ago
    When I removed the type checking stage, that was with Pyright, which I'd used because of these sorts of recommendations. It has some advantages over Mypy, sure, but it still ended up being more hindrance than help. Particularly with things being of type `Unknown`, which produced all sorts of errors that I could never properly disable.
BigJono 3y ago
I don't know how you can put TS in the S-tier when the community is hell bent on making every codebase as unreadable and complicated as possible.
- petesergeant 3y ago
  > when the community is hell bent on making every codebase as unreadable and complicated as possible I don’t understand what you’re getting at, but clearly you’re expressing some pain here: what are some examples?

th0ma5 3y ago

Are those tiers good or bad? What is the order?

treflop 3y ago
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_list https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_list
bmacho 3y ago
SABCDEF descending
- th0ma5 3y ago
  Why not different letters this seems to go unanswered

MrJohz 3y ago

Yeah, I've recently removed type checking in a Python project because it was causing more false positives than true positives, and working around the type checker's complaints was just getting too tedious. I'm a big fan of type checking in general, and Typescript is a great example of a type checker that allows you to statically define all the dynamic idioms that you'd normally use. But for various reasons, that just doesn't seem to have happened in the Python ecosystem. Instead, you can either write normal dynamic Python without types, or you can restrict yourself to a vaguely Java-like subset of Python with hard-to-use generics and confusing rules about forward references. I wonder if it would have been better to have taken the Typescript approach and have Mypy and all its annotations developed as a separate language, rather than as part of the Python language, with the expectation that they could eventually be merged at some point. As it is, it feels like both sides have been very constrained: Mypy has struggled to innovate on expressive type-level syntax because it only operates on standard Python code, and Python has struggled with balancing the various goals that different groups have for youry annotations. The result is a kind of mess where it's still painful to type basic things like generics (yes, that's changing, but not if you need to support older Python versions), but you also have weird syntax that requires type annotations, even if they're meaningless (like with dataclasses).

jowf8fa9sdf 3y ago
Have you tried pyright? I find it way better than mypy.
- MrJohz 3y ago
  When I removed the type checking stage, that was with Pyright, which I'd used because of these sorts of recommendations. It has some advantages over Mypy, sure, but it still ended up being more hindrance than help. Particularly with things being of type `Unknown`, which produced all sorts of errors that I could never properly disable.

BigJono 3y ago

I don't know how you can put TS in the S-tier when the community is hell bent on making every codebase as unreadable and complicated as possible.

petesergeant 3y ago
> when the community is hell bent on making every codebase as unreadable and complicated as possible I don’t understand what you’re getting at, but clearly you’re expressing some pain here: what are some examples?