I can do the same with npm, but if there’s a @types available (or better yet built in), I barely have to read long-form documentation and I get smart completions with documentation, types, etc right in my editor, specific to the exact expression I’m editing.

And...exactly the same with mypy, either via in-library typings or the typeshed.

Projects in the npm ecosystem may be somewhat more likely to.have typings if the project exists, but I find that, for anything other than web frontend, where JS is obviously king, the tool I'm looking for is more likely to actually exist in the python ecosystem.

Are there mypy typings available for things like sci-py and simpletransformers, and if so how do I acquire them?

You can gradually annotate these packages locally for your project with [1], and then contribute it to [2].

Automatic stub generation may also be helpful [3]

[1] https://github.com/python/mypy/wiki/Creating-Stubs-For-Pytho...

[2] https://github.com/python/typeshed

[3] https://mypy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/stubgen.html

There’s a couple dozen packages on there. This can’t be described as “exactly the same” as npm/typescript if the scale and level of community involvement [1] is nowhere near the same.

1: among the most important things here, in addition to the strength of the type system, where mypy also lacks

People love the language because the language doesn't matter?

I don't think that quite explains it. We loved Python at version 1, before pip and PyPI were around - although the "batteries included" standard library played a similar role to some extent. For me it's mostly the syntax and the simplicity.

Just my opinion, as someone who loves the ecosystem and tolerates the language.