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

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Tue Apr 21 03:07:02 CEST 2015

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 10:52 AM, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:

Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 9:41 AM, Jack Diederich <jackdied at gmail.com> wrote: > * It is not optional. Please stop saying that. The people promoting > it would prefer that everyone use it. If it is approved it will be > optional in the way that PEP8 is optional. If I'm reading your > annotated code it is certainly /not/ optional that I understand the > annotations. […]

Maybe I'm completely misreading everything here […] I think you've misunderstood the complaint. When you're writing a library, it can be a great help to provide type annotations, because every application that uses your library can benefit. When you're writing an application, you can completely ignore them, but still get the benefit of everyone else's. Jack is not complaining only about writing code. He's complaining about the effect this will have on code that we all are expected to read.

Ahh. Yes, that's a concern. When you go digging into that library to find out how it works, yes, you'd be face-to-face with their type annotations.

I doubt the worst-case complex ones are going to come up all that often, though. Sure, you might declare that something returns a list of dictionaries mapping tuples of integers and strings to list of sets of atoms, but that's hardly common. (And chances are you can just declare that it returns List[Dict] and have done with it.)

Maybe it'd be of value to have a quick "code stripper" that takes away all the annotations, plus any other junk/framing that you're not interested in, and gives you something you can browse in a text editor? It could take away all the Sphinx adornments from docstrings, any source control versioning markers, all that kind of thing. Then you could read through the code in a simpler form, while still having type annotations there for you if you need them.

ChrisA

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