Python's static typing still feels very very clunky and bolted on, and tooling around it was rather bad, like mypy. In general I definitely wouldn't say python tooling was good. It's improving rapidly with ruff tho, just as JavaScript when esbuild appeared.

Dumb question: I know the built-in typing (import typing) is limited in some ways, but it works pretty fine to cover most basic needs. So what does mypy add? I'm super interested in adding typing to some code we have but I'm just a bit confused by the choices available.

Would mypy with pydantic be a good combination or do they overlap?

The two are complementary: the built-in `typing` module only provides type annotations, not type checking. Mypy provides the latter, via the type annotations that you (and others) add to Python codebases.

Pydantic overlaps with mypy in the sense that it provides a mypy plugin, but otherwise it's just like any other Python library.

So mypy runs "at run time"? I guess that makes sense, I thought the annotations provided some form of checking too, but now I realize that I should really spend some time to inform myself better :').

Sort of -- mypy is its own standalone program, and you run it to typecheck your program's type annotations. It does some evaluation of the Python program (specifically imports and some very basic conditional evaluation, among other things), but it never really executes the codebase itself.

No, it's more that pydantic runs "at run time" while mypy not.

Mypy runs as a type linter/checker. See https://mypy-lang.org/

Isn't Python's tooling usually considered some of the worst?

By what standard? Yours? Java developers? Rust developers? The fact that Python has typing now, tools to check those, and has plenty of tooling around “make it faster”, I think your world view might be stuck in 2010. Python has gone from a slow obscure scripting language to a powerhouse. Conda, NumPy, Scikit, PyTorch, GPU programming, Games, Analytics, web apps, API’s, I think it’s safe to say this ain’t your grandpa’s Python anymore.

I have seen Python in action since 2010 plenty of times, including the present. It's been a mess every time. My worldview is driven by F# and Elixir, namely the `dotnet` and `mix` tooling, respectively. So no, Python's tooling does not impress me in the slightest. The first thing you need to do is get agreement on all the different checkers, linters, formatters. For Elixir, there's one tool for each task. My worldview feels quite current.

Those other things you mentioned aren't relevant to tooling. They're distributions, libraries, and applications. But note that Conda's existence was basically due to the fact of Python's tooling being poor.

You see tooling in a different view than typical Python users. Python users see things like iPython, notebooks, the ability to quickly do statistics and plot results, as tooling - to do their jobs. Data Science. Machine learning. Things that perplex and confound static-typing OOP purists. So yes, by your world view - Python is a mess. There's no one way to do things, there's no one tool, no one linter, no one formatter. I praise the fact that there isn't. What a boring world. What choice would you have if that tool didn't satisfy your needs? Find another language?

I began in that world view. The C/C++/Java/DotNet everything must have a standard, a fixation on a singular consensus. That's not how things work in the open source world of Python, javascript, rust, etc. Will there be gravitation towards a paradigm? sure, until such time that a new one emerges.

If you looked at Python in the 2.5 days and looked at Python today - You cannot argue the tooling has gotten better.

> You see tooling in a different view than typical Python users.

That doesn't surprise me.

I do what you mentioned with F# in Polyglot Notebooks (which support several languages in the same notebook) and Elixir in Livebook all the time, both of which are superior notebook implementations to the outdated Python Jupyter notebooks.

My worldview is not driven by comparing Python to C#, Java, C++, and other such ilk.

So following your logic, "some of the worst" includes the vast majority of actually used languages and tools. Must be cool to be on the special side. :)

They want to be lisp SOOO BAD! =)