Pycharm tries really hard to paper over the lack of static typing in Python. Variable/function refactoring works mostly, code completion is acceptable (especially if you're inside a specially supported-framework like Django) and sometimes it'll show up a type error before your tests fail, saving you the time it takes up setup the test db, run the tests etc...

I love Pycharm, and I think people who go without IDE support are masochists (I did it for a few years with Python, and I'm not going back) but it's not like the kind of tooling support you get from a proper statically typed language, where the IDE can do so much to help you.

And I say this as someone who's been full time in Python for years. It's a fun language to write, with a wonderful ecosystem, but it's not good enough when your codebase gets big or you need to do major refactoring.

>Pycharm tries really hard to paper over the lack of static typing in Python.

It does and IMO this is the wrong approach. I usually fire off a test and use that the push the code to the line I'm interested in, at which point I fire up IPython.embed().

That gives you perfect code completion, instant variable inspection (including instant docstring and code lookup) and the ability to execute and inspect on the fly.

You can then fairly easily copy and paste the lines you want back to the text editor.

IMO that's a step ahead of just having autocomplete in an IDE.

That sounds interesting, do you have any details (blog post, tutorial) on exactly how to do that?

Typing is now available in recent versions of the language.