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Comment by kubb | Hacker News Reader

In my office, everyone seems to avoid python like fire. The big reason seems to be that lack of static type checking makes their work harder in the long run.

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Python is no Haskell but type hints does reach Pareto level for catching bugs. Mypy is now well integrated into IDE so no reason to have a type error anymore.

I will switch to python 3.10 as soon as it's released just for the better error messages and the typing goodies though.

Apparently the type hints don't work because people don't use them in libraries.

I was going to object that one reason for not using static typing is that certain perfectly reasonable patterns are difficult to describe to the type checker, e.g. sharing tests between TestCase classes by using a mix-in – but apparently[1] Python 3.8 solved that particular case.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/60323489/896841

This is true. But it doesn't necessarily make Python bad. It's just not the right tool for the job.

I love Python (I consider it my main language), but there are a ton of use cases for which I wouldn't use it for. Namely, if you need: robustness (provided by static typing, for example for critical systems), performance, parallelism. Scala, Rust, C# (Go, C++ also, but I dislike these two) are better options.

Do they avoid all dynamic typed languages or only Python in particular?

All of them, but Python is the only one (apart from Javascript) that's approved for internal use.

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