Re:Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down
by codethief on Monday February 15, 2021 @01:19PM
(#26145429)
> Writing type hinted python in Pycharm or Ipython feels like racing in a sports car. Without it, feels like stop and go traffic with the occasional car accident.
This is a beautiful analogy!
As for the second part, though, I would say that even if your IDE does not provide automatic type checking, type hints will still add some benefit because:
- without type hints you have to do all type checking in your head (across all stack frames).
- whereas with type hints you only need to do type checking down to the first level of the stack.
To illustrate what I mean, consider the following code:
def bar(param1, param2):
... # Some complicated code from which it is not immediately clear what values are allowed for param1 and param2, nor what the return type of the function is.
def foo(param):
return bar(param, param2="some default value")
foo("something something")
Now, in order to verify that `foo("something something")` is correct, you have to manually look at foo() and then at bar(). Needless to say, this adds a lot of mental overhead to the game. If we added type hints to both foo() and bar(), however, you would only have to check the signature foo() – which, even in IDEs without type checking, usually amounts to hovering over `foo("something something")`.
This is a beautiful analogy!
As for the second part, though, I would say that even if your IDE does not provide automatic type checking, type hints will still add some benefit because:
- without type hints you have to do all type checking in your head (across all stack frames).
- whereas with type hints you only need to do type checking down to the first level of the stack.
To illustrate what I mean, consider the following code:
Now, in order to verify that `foo("something something")` is correct, you have to manually look at foo() and then at bar(). Needless to say, this adds a lot of mental overhead to the game. If we added type hints to both foo() and bar(), however, you would only have to check the signature foo() – which, even in IDEs without type checking, usually amounts to hovering over `foo("something something")`.