I can also imagine that it must be hard to maintain, like sometimes the types must accidentally change
They cannot add it in other people's libraries.
> did not stop Python rising to conqueror the world
I wasn't talking popularity, I was talking maintainability. Python is not a stellar example of maintainability (source: maintained the Python API for a timeless debugger for 5 years).
Python's ubiquity is unfortunate, thankfully there seems to be a movement away from typeless signatures, both with Python's gradual typing (an underwhelming implementation of gradual typing, unfortunately) and Typescript.
Does it matter that much how the internals of someone else's library are implemented? The tooling will tell you the types anyway and module interfaces will have type signatures.
> Python's ubiquity is unfortunate,
Well that we can agree on!
not in other people's code. My main concern is that gradual typing makes understanding other people's code more difficult.
Idiomatic Haskell warns against missing signatures[1], Rust makes them mandatory. Rather than global inference, local inference stopping at function boundaries is the future, if you ask me.
The worst case is actually worse than when types are mandatory, since you can get an error in the wrong place. For example, if a function has the wrong type inferred then you get an error when you use it even though the actual location of the error is at the declaration site. Type inference is good but there should be some places (ex. function declarations) where annotations are required.