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I've been writing python for a living for almost 20 years. Big projects. Never felt the need for static typing. And I strongly dislike the verbosity and complex

by jgb1984 2y ago

I've been writing python for a living for almost 20 years. Big projects. Never felt the need for static typing. And I strongly dislike the verbosity and complexity it adds to the language. Python is beautiful because it's simple, easy to read, easy to understand. The typing tagged on to it looks like an ugly word salad to me. I'll keep my dynamic typing, thanks!

IshKebab 2y ago
Have you ever tried static typing though? I suspect you don't know what you're missing. Static types make Python way easier to understand.
- maleldil 2y ago
  Unfortunately, when many people hear of static typing they think of C++ and Java, which understandably leads to these kinds of conclusions. If they ever bothered writing typed Python for a little bit, especially in new packages or projects where the surrounding code is also typed, they might realise how useful it is. There's a world of difference between the experience you get with untyped Python and typed Python that you check with strict mypy or Pyright. After using typed Python for a while, I don't think I could go back to a completely untyped codebase.
- diggan 2y ago
  > Have you ever tried static typing though? I suspect you don't know what you're missing. Static types make Python way easier to understand. I'd probably call myself within the "dynamic typing crowd" and I've tried plenty of static typing. It mostly just slows down iterating on something, prevents issues that I/my projects don't really suffer from in the first place, and gets in the way more than it helps. The statically typed languages I've tried are: C#, Crystal, Elm, Go, Haskell, Haxe, Java, Kotlin, Nim, Rust, TypeScript and probably more I'm forgetting about. Out of those, I've probably written most Rust code. I wouldn't say I despise static typing, but I'm not getting the same value from it that others seem to get. I still come back to Clojure, ClojureScript or just straight up vanilla JavaScript, as they're much more effective at actually helping me solve the problem I have in my practical day-to-day.
  - binary132 2y ago
    I love Lua but I spend way more time than is fair hunting through my codebase to find the name of that one thing I was trying to access but that doesn’t seem to be present any more and where and when it was created. (Inb4 “better unit tests!” — typesystems do that bit of thinking for you…) I feel the same way about Lisps, but more strongly. It’s really fast and fun to sketch stuff up until you’re about 3 or 4 functions deep trying to figure out the shape of that one inner associative array and what made you think this little adventure was a good idea in the first place.
    - diggan 2y ago
      > It’s really fast and fun to sketch stuff up until you’re about 3 or 4 functions deep trying to figure out the shape of that one inner associative array and what made you think this little adventure was a good idea in the first place. But that's exactly the situations where lisps shines! Select the form in your editor, evaluate it and your editor tells you exactly what it is, both runtime and compile-time data, pure magic :)
      - binary132 2y ago
        yes that time but maybe not next time
        diggan 2y ago
        What do you mean? Why wouldn't it work next time?
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    > I'm not getting the same value from it that others seem to get. Another reason I've seen people not realise how good static types are is if they aren't using a proper IDE with code intelligence. The benefits of static typing are: 1. Fewer bugs. 2. Makes code easier to understand, because you know what types things are. That gives you a lot of information (even "business domain" things) that usually aren't documented in dynamically typed code. 3. Navigating code in an IDE that understands the language is a lot faster. E.g. you can just ctrl-click something to go to its definition, auto-complete works reliably, you can find all the uses of an item reliably, etc. 4. Refactoring code becomes tractable and easy. You can rename an item and it will automatically update all the usages. Anything you miss will get caught by the type checker. If you don't use a proper IDE you're missing out on half of that. Even so, I don't really see how you can say it gets in the way more than it helps. Unless you're working on really small & one-off projects, the amount of time you'll save by not having to deal with type errors or spend ages deciphering code just to figure out what type something has easily offsets any time adding the types.

IshKebab 2y ago

Have you ever tried static typing though? I suspect you don't know what you're missing. Static types make Python way easier to understand.

maleldil 2y ago
Unfortunately, when many people hear of static typing they think of C++ and Java, which understandably leads to these kinds of conclusions. If they ever bothered writing typed Python for a little bit, especially in new packages or projects where the surrounding code is also typed, they might realise how useful it is. There's a world of difference between the experience you get with untyped Python and typed Python that you check with strict mypy or Pyright. After using typed Python for a while, I don't think I could go back to a completely untyped codebase.
diggan 2y ago
> Have you ever tried static typing though? I suspect you don't know what you're missing. Static types make Python way easier to understand. I'd probably call myself within the "dynamic typing crowd" and I've tried plenty of static typing. It mostly just slows down iterating on something, prevents issues that I/my projects don't really suffer from in the first place, and gets in the way more than it helps. The statically typed languages I've tried are: C#, Crystal, Elm, Go, Haskell, Haxe, Java, Kotlin, Nim, Rust, TypeScript and probably more I'm forgetting about. Out of those, I've probably written most Rust code. I wouldn't say I despise static typing, but I'm not getting the same value from it that others seem to get. I still come back to Clojure, ClojureScript or just straight up vanilla JavaScript, as they're much more effective at actually helping me solve the problem I have in my practical day-to-day.
- binary132 2y ago
  I love Lua but I spend way more time than is fair hunting through my codebase to find the name of that one thing I was trying to access but that doesn’t seem to be present any more and where and when it was created. (Inb4 “better unit tests!” — typesystems do that bit of thinking for you…) I feel the same way about Lisps, but more strongly. It’s really fast and fun to sketch stuff up until you’re about 3 or 4 functions deep trying to figure out the shape of that one inner associative array and what made you think this little adventure was a good idea in the first place.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > It’s really fast and fun to sketch stuff up until you’re about 3 or 4 functions deep trying to figure out the shape of that one inner associative array and what made you think this little adventure was a good idea in the first place. But that's exactly the situations where lisps shines! Select the form in your editor, evaluate it and your editor tells you exactly what it is, both runtime and compile-time data, pure magic :)
    - binary132 2y ago
      yes that time but maybe not next time
      - diggan 2y ago
        What do you mean? Why wouldn't it work next time?
- IshKebab 2y ago
  > I'm not getting the same value from it that others seem to get. Another reason I've seen people not realise how good static types are is if they aren't using a proper IDE with code intelligence. The benefits of static typing are: 1. Fewer bugs. 2. Makes code easier to understand, because you know what types things are. That gives you a lot of information (even "business domain" things) that usually aren't documented in dynamically typed code. 3. Navigating code in an IDE that understands the language is a lot faster. E.g. you can just ctrl-click something to go to its definition, auto-complete works reliably, you can find all the uses of an item reliably, etc. 4. Refactoring code becomes tractable and easy. You can rename an item and it will automatically update all the usages. Anything you miss will get caught by the type checker. If you don't use a proper IDE you're missing out on half of that. Even so, I don't really see how you can say it gets in the way more than it helps. Unless you're working on really small & one-off projects, the amount of time you'll save by not having to deal with type errors or spend ages deciphering code just to figure out what type something has easily offsets any time adding the types.