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Comment by sbuccini | Hacker News Reader

I'd also like to hear more about this -- both the feature set and the development process. It's interesting that two large engineering organizations responsible for some of the most popular applications on the planet spent hundreds of engineering hours building almost the same exact tool at around the exact same time.

I'd also like to know how much quicker or better it could have been completed if it had been done out in the open.

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The idea to gather types at runtime is as old as PEP 484. The Dropbox and Facebook teams working on Python type checking know each other. We both worked on our implementations independently since we wanted to first test internally whether the idea holds water. For example, I personally thought it wouldn't be as useful in practice as it turned out to be!

We knew we're going to open-source each others' implementations, esp. that Instagram's is focusing solely on Python 3 which isn't useful for Dropbox at the moment. It just took a while to get through the process of open sourcing what we had (cleaning up the early implementation with limited documentation, decoupling from internal data stores, etc.).

Would it be cheaper if this started out in the open? Probably, but I don't think by quite the margin as you expect.

Even though MonkeyType is focused on Python 3, can the .pyi files be used with Python 2?

"I'd also like to know how much quicker or better it could have been completed if it had been done out in the open. "

I assume they scratched their own itch so it was probably faster to do it on their own addressing their specific needs.

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