Go: What We Got Right, What We Got Wrong

Re:Go: What We Got Right, What We Got Wrong by pphysch on Thursday January 04, 2024 @05:27PM (#38873166)

This is a software engineering practices problem rather than a Python problem. Python has great tooling and language support for type annotations. I work on large Python codebases with ease because I leverage these things. My IDE is able to do static analysis and catch potential typing errors before runtime.

The problem is we have researchers with no SWE expertise writing huge codebases in Jupyter notebooks inside a bespoke, possibly unreproducible Anaconda environment. That is going to be a maintenance disaster no matter which language is being used.

And if you force your researchers, who are using to being productive prototyping in Python, R, etc. to use a statically-typed language, they are going to complain and be a lot less productive at their job.

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Re:Go: What We Got Right, What We Got Wrong by theLiminator on Thursday January 04, 2024 @05:30PM (#38873199)

I find mypy and the other type checkers I've used kinda painful due to false positives.

I think with proper type inference, there would be a lot less pain around static typing.

Ideally users should be forced to type their function signatures and everything else can be inferred.

Definitely I do agree with you that the situation today is much superior to even just 4-5 years ago.

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