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I was really happy when I first learned of type annotations being added to Python. However, much of that excitement evaporated when I read that it was just a 'hint' and not something that's enforced.

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This was also my initial reaction. However, if you couple type annotations with an LSP server[1] that takes the annotations into consideration[2], you'll get on-the-fly type checking in your editor or IDE. That way you can catch type errors as you write your typed Python code.

Besides VS Code, these days lightweight editors like Kate, Sublime Text, Vim, etc can all take advantage of type checking LSP servers for Python.

[1] https://github.com/palantir/python-language-server

[2] https://github.com/tomv564/pyls-mypy

It's not enforced by CPython the interpreter. You run mypy to enforce the type hints: http://mypy-lang.org/

It's quite good.

I like it a lot. Use it with --disallow-untyped-defs to make sure more is caught.

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