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Comment by zephyrfalcon | Hacker News Reader

There is definitely a push for it; not all of us think it's an improvement. When I see modern Python code, it looks nothing like the (relatively) clean, smallish and easy-to-understand language that it was 25 years ago. I get it, things change. The language now caters to a different crowd and attracts different people.

But I have often wondered, if someone wants static typing, why not just use a statically typed language?

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I would and do, but a lot of existing code (especially ML code) is Python and I find myself having to interface with it. It's not an awful lot of fun, especially when there are no annotations to record what the code expects and what it outputs.

> But I have often wondered, if someone wants static typing, why not just use a statically typed language?

A very high proportion of Python devs aren’t using it for the language, but for the libraries and ecosystem. Also lots of them weren’t the ones who picked it.

Meanwhile, not at least having the kind of autocomplete and documentation that type hints provide is kinda hellish on any project of more than 200 or so lines. The time savings from spotting runtime bugs before they happen is just a bonus.

Personally, I almost never need to add a type hint outside high-level definitions and function/method signatures, so they’re not really in the way even when I’m being pretty thorough with them.

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