[Python-Dev] Type hints -- a mediocre programmer's reaction (original) (raw)

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Mon Apr 20 22:37:04 CEST 2015

I wrote a longer response and then realized it didn't really add much to the discussion. So let me be short: type annotations do not appeal to me, and I am not looking forward to the cognitive overhead of dealing with them. Perhaps I will eventually grow to like them if the tools that use them really add value. You'll have to sell me on it, though.

On Mon, 20 Apr 2015 12:35:33 -0700, <lukasz at langa.pl> wrote:

Stub files have many downsides, too, unfortunately: - we don’t want to have them, but we need to have them (C extensions, third-party modules, Python 2, …) - they bring cognitive overhead of having to switch between two files - they require the author to repeat himself quite a lot - they might go out of date much easier than annotations in the function signature

The whole point of type hints is for the linters/IDEs, so IMO it is perfectly reasonable to put the burden of making them useful onto the linters/IDEs. The UI for it can unify the two files into a single view...I know because way back in the dark ages I wrote a small editor-based IDE that did something very analogous on an IBM Mainframe, and it worked really well as a development environment.

--David

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