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

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Tue Apr 21 22:02:45 CEST 2015

(Gmail messed up the attributions - apologies if I didn't fix them up correctly).

21 April 2015 at 19:55, Łukasz Langa <lukasz at langa.pl> wrote:

On Apr 21, 2015, at 11:23 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

2. Clearly, great thought has been put into this PEP. If anyone has a good analysis of the potential impact on Python 3 adoption, please do pass along. I would be interested in reading the information. I wish I had a crystal ball, but this is hard to predict. Anecdotally, some people believe this will be catnip, while others believe it to be poison. The truth will surely be somewhere in the middle. At this point we don't know what drives Python 3 adoption except time -- it's definitely going up. :-) Anecdotal evidence shows that some organizations perceive this feature as one that justifies migration. Some of those organizations are pretty serious about open-sourcing things. That makes me believe that by sheer volume of the code they’re producing, Python 3 adoption will continue to increase. As Gregory Smith rightfully pointed out, nobody wants ugly code. I understand why people are afraid of that and it warms my heart that they are. The community cares so much about aesthetics and readability, it’s great! We will evolve this over time. This will be a learning process for everybody but we can’t learn to swim by only theorizing about it. We thought of the evolving nature of the solution from Day 1, hence the provisional nature of it. The wordy syntax is another example of that. Not requiring changes to the interpreter and the standard library was very high on the list of priorities. Once the concept proves itself, then we can improve on the syntax. Acknowledging PEP 484 being just the second step^ in a long journey is why some “obvious” parts are left out for now (hello, duck typing; hello, multiple dispatch; hello, runtime type checks in unit tests; etc. etc.). Those are often big enough to warrant their own PEPs. ^ PEP 3107 being the first.

Thank you for this response. For some reason, it's reassured me a lot (I've no idea really why it struck a chord with me more than any of the other responses in the thread, just one of those things, I guess).

Paul

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