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Comment by randomdude402 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah Python has its points where it doesn't shine, but the stacktrace does a consistently good job of telling you exactly where the logic broke down.

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I love Python, and generally I agree, but the place where an error is raised can be significantly distant from the event that occurred which caused it. The lack of static typing can really make it difficult to find such bugs sometimes.

A statically typed language with compile-time type checking would flag that immediately, and chances are your IDE will show the error before it even gets to that point.

Type hints are a thing, but then you are already moving in that direction while remaining in python.

Agree that there's a big difference between the error happening at compile time vs. happening at run time in prod, but I personally find the python stacktrace much more descriptive of how we got to the error than a lot of other languages.

A certain amount of it is probably a familiarity thing, but I do usually find myself able to parse it to the point of what line in which file things started to go wrong.

Other languages can do the same, they just deliberately make the decision not to because of performance. Ruby has the same nice stacktrace (even nicer).

There was some work that took ML compile time errors and created Python-like stacktraces of how this specific error could blow up at runtime in a Python-like fashion. Students found those concrete errors with concrete values easier to reason about than abstract compile time errors.

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