Some people may not understand the context of this part: So not long ago someone apparently convinced someone else at a conference that static typing

Some people may not understand the context of this part: So not long ago someone apparently convinced someone else at a conference that static typing is awesome and should be a language feature. I'm not exactly sure how that discussion went but the end result was that mypy's type module in combination with Python 3's annotation syntax were declared to be the gold standard of typing in Python. Ronacher is referring to the fact that Guido van Rossum, the Python language creator and BDFL, recently said he wanted to make mypy's type annotation standard into a standard by making use of Python 3 function annotations. The original function annotations standard is PEP-3107[1], GvR's proposal is on the python-ideas list[2], and information on mypy can be found at the project's site[3]. I agree with Ronacher's conclusion; I don't think static types -- even if only used at runtime -- are a good fit for the language. As for function annotation syntax, I think we just need to admit that isn't really good for anything. Great article! [1]: http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3107/ http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3107/ [2]: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2014-August/028618.html https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2014-August/0... [3]: http://www.mypy-lang.org/ http://www.mypy-lang.org/