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strunzlast Tuesday at 5:24 PM2 repliesview on HN

I swear the only the people who care about Python types are on Hacker News comments. I've never actually worked with or met someone who cared so much about it, and the ones that care at all seem just fine with type hints.


Replies

hu3last Tuesday at 5:28 PM

Perhaps some people that cared moved to other languages.

And part of those who still complain are momentarily stuck with it.

Just like survivorship bias. It's productive to ponder on the issues experienced by those who never returned.

josephglast Tuesday at 7:30 PM

The people we happen to work with is an incredibly biased sample set of all software engineers.

As an example, almost everyone I’ve worked with in my career likes using macOS and Linux. But there are entire software engineering sub communities who stick to windows. For them, macOS is a quaint toy.

If you’ve never met or worked with people who care about typing, I think that says more about your workplace and coworkers than anything. I’ve worked with plenty of engineers who consider dynamic typing to be abhorrent. Especially at places like FAANG.

Long before typescript, before nodejs, before even “JavaScript the good parts”, Google wrote their own JavaScript compiler called Closure. The compiler is written in Java. It could do many things - but as far as I can tell, the main purpose of the compiler was to add types to JavaScript. Why? Because googlers would rather write a compiler from scratch than use a dynamically typed language. I know it was used to make the the early versions of Gmail. It may still be in use to this day.