Hallelujah, that's always been my position. To the static typing folks: leave my dynamically typed languages alone and go coding with something that really suit your needs. If the answer is that Python, Ruby, JS, whatever are really much more pleasant to code with, my reply is that they are so precisely because we don't have to type type definitions. Tradeoffs.

Running more type checkers isn't really about strictness. The main benefit to library maintainers is to make sure that their APIs are compatible with whatever tools their users run.

This wouldn't really be an issue for most other languages, but Python's typing ecosystem is uniquely fragmented, with only partial standardization between several popular tools.

Personally because I'm making a blender add on that only uses python, and it's at the complexity where having types catches a ton of bugs easily.

> If you are going to be super-strict with type-checking, wouldn’t it be best to switch to a statically typed language and get the performance gains as well?

You can use type-checking to get better performance already, without leaving Python. See https://blog.glyph.im/2022/04/you-should-compile-your-python...

Yes, but unfortunately Python has invaded everything, and one must adapt.

Python is going to be preinstalled on almost any machine I use, with a reasonable assortment of libraries. And even if they're not preinstalled, the libraries I want are likely to exist. They'll have unstable APIs and weird quirks, and I'll have to take my choice of bad packaging systems to install them, and everything will just generally be a pain, but they'll exist and largely work. That's not true for any language I actually want to code in. I mean, I'm not going to deny that Python is better than shell scripts or (usually) C.

It's not like it's a pleasant language to code in, especially if you actually want to use the type support, which is weird and irregular and keeps changing and has to work around fundamental design problems at the core of the language.

strict type checking is an incredibly useful tool for cases when you really want to make sure your code is correct and behaving as expected (one of many tools).

There are lots of people who like python and want to use it for things that where incorrect code has serious consequences. Type checking is helpful in these contexts.

Type checking remains optional for the masses and is not practical in many cases. Still, pushing away people who want to use all available tools for writing correct python only hurts the community.

What statically typed language would you suggest for machine learning and large data pipelines? I don't love Python, but it has by far the largest ecosystem.

Yes. If you have a choice.

For people who don't have a choice, type checked Python is better than nothing.

Yeah, I can't say I really get the appeal of gradual typing. It's commented/documented code at best and outright lies at worst. Sure, you can build tooling around it and improve your DX a bit but isn't it always a house of cards?

> If you are going to be super-strict with type-checking, wouldn’t it be best to switch to a statically typed language and get the performance gains as well?

I don't understand your question. The whole point of static code analysis is preventing bugs. Don't you like Python code to not have bugs that are easily caught with static code analysis, or is preventing code a foreign idea that is better left to other languages?

[dead]