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PyCon US 2021 Recordings are Available

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Re: PyCon US 2021 Recordings are Available

#21

Post by caturopath »

TheGuyWhoCodes wrote: post #18
wonton53 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great! I am so glad more people see types as a useful tool. Personally I see it as essential, so I struggle to understand the mind set of people who do not want to use them. I understand that people think it feels like a lot of work, but that is like nothing compared to the 90% of time people who dont use types spend on reading logs and fixng the same issues every day. I assume people have some sort of amnesia and th…

> I struggle to understand the mind set of people who do not want to use them It usually comes from people who never had experience with statically typed languages, don't work on projects with a large dev team, cross teams projects or work with a lot of 3rd party libraries. They don't realize the maintenance nightmare that types can easy. Sure you write one off script, or something that is rarely run don't use types,…

That might be where it usually comes from, but that hasn't been my experience. My Python subcommunity groupthink was against type annotations for years, despite the groupthink also saying that statically typed are better all things equal and most of the loudest folks having worked for some FAANG company.

Thinking that typing is good and buying that a pasted-on-after-the-fact typing system is good are different matters.

Re: PyCon US 2021 Recordings are Available

#22

Post by yuy910616 »

caturopath wrote: post #21
TheGuyWhoCodes wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I struggle to understand the mind set of people who do not want to use them It usually comes from people who never had experience with statically typed languages, don't work on projects with a large dev team, cross teams projects or work with a lot of 3rd party libraries. They don't realize the maintenance nightmare that types can easy. Sure you write one off script, or something that is rarely run don't use types,…

That might be where it usually comes from, but that hasn't been my experience. My Python subcommunity groupthink was against type annotations for years, despite the groupthink also saying that statically typed are better all things equal and most of the loudest folks having worked for some FAANG company. Thinking that typing is good and buying that a pasted-on-after-the-fact typing system is good are different matter…

In my experience, it was quite jarring to see a python function with a bunch of : -> Union[int,str], Optional, Any, etc.

Change is always hard.

Re: PyCon US 2021 Recordings are Available

#23

Post by heavyset_go »

yuy910616 wrote: post #14

After watching this 2018 talk on typing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWV8t494N88 and this one last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST33zDM9vOE&t=68s and finally this one in 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lj_9TyT3V98 I think I'll finally start using type checking - it really seems to just eliminate a whole class of potential bugs; a class that is often not tested at that.

Use an editor with an LSP client, along with pyls-mypy[1], and you'll get type checking support as you write your code. I just use the typing module and not Mypy, and it still works great.

[1] https://github.com/tomv564/pyls-mypy

Re: PyCon US 2021 Recordings are Available

#24

Post by wonton53 »

TheGuyWhoCodes wrote: post #18
wonton53 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great! I am so glad more people see types as a useful tool. Personally I see it as essential, so I struggle to understand the mind set of people who do not want to use them. I understand that people think it feels like a lot of work, but that is like nothing compared to the 90% of time people who dont use types spend on reading logs and fixng the same issues every day. I assume people have some sort of amnesia and th…

> I struggle to understand the mind set of people who do not want to use them It usually comes from people who never had experience with statically typed languages, don't work on projects with a large dev team, cross teams projects or work with a lot of 3rd party libraries. They don't realize the maintenance nightmare that types can easy. Sure you write one off script, or something that is rarely run don't use types,…

Very true, but there is a gradient there. I have an example of the opposite extreme. A few years ago I worked with a person who would rather continue working in php 5.3 than start using Scala, which was hot at the time. He literally copy-pasted an old project instead of starting a new one in Scala (or ANY other language, this was a payment system and php does not even have strong enough crypto support in old versions). And I can tell you for sure he had at least 1 year exposure to Scala and doing at least 1 full project. His reasoning for copy-pasting old php: He was «just too stupid to understand Scala». It is an extreme example, but most people I met who dont like strong typing fall into that category (lazy? Certainly not stupid) and I just dont know what to say to them or what to think myself to accept them or even how to use whatever hidden powers these people have other than creating circular dependencies for the company by making obvoius mistakes they themselves spend most of their time fixing. Im not actually bitter, just frustrated that so many seem to just not care.

Re: PyCon US 2021 Recordings are Available

#25

Post by travisgriggs »

yuy910616 wrote: post #14

After watching this 2018 talk on typing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWV8t494N88 and this one last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST33zDM9vOE&t=68s and finally this one in 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lj_9TyT3V98 I think I'll finally start using type checking - it really seems to just eliminate a whole class of potential bugs; a class that is often not tested at that.

I like typing in Python because I can choose how much I want to use it. If I want to script something, or prototype something, or test something in a repl, no overhead of typing needed.

It's also been my experience (C(++), Kotlin, Swift) that as the complexity of typing increases, 10% of the time I spend servicing types accounts for 90% of the sites I need typing, and the other 90% of the time spent on types is me cursing at the compiler trying to make it accept the odd 10%.

An optional type annotation system allows ME to pick where I want that effort/payback balance to be at on a case by case basis.

Re: PyCon US 2021 Recordings are Available

#26

Post by acdha »

wonton53 wrote: post #15
yuy910616 wrote: post #14

After watching this 2018 talk on typing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWV8t494N88 and this one last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST33zDM9vOE&t=68s and finally this one in 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lj_9TyT3V98 I think I'll finally start using type checking - it really seems to just eliminate a whole class of potential bugs; a class that is often not tested at that.

Great! I am so glad more people see types as a useful tool. Personally I see it as essential, so I struggle to understand the mind set of people who do not want to use them. I understand that people think it feels like a lot of work, but that is like nothing compared to the 90% of time people who dont use types spend on reading logs and fixng the same issues every day. I assume people have some sort of amnesia and th…

A lot of it depends on the work you do, and what other kinds of tools you use. If you’re working with simpler code and use something like flake8 or have a reasonably fast test cycle, you can be pretty productive either way. If you work with harder-to-type data structures (e.g. nested JSON or XML), you’ll see less wins from typing then validation (this is why Django apps tend to have fewer issues this way because the database validation reduces the amount of data motion before something validates it).

That’s not to say that typing isn’t useful - I use it daily, especially since VSC has made it a lot faster than mypy - but I do think the Python community is wide enough that you can find people legitimately saying it is or isn’t a big deal for them as a function of where they work. You also have a certain amount of PTSD from languages like Java which make typing far more labor intensive and through some combination of limited expressiveness, dynamic logic, and culture end up making the benefits less than anticipated.

Re: PyCon US 2021 Recordings are Available

#27

Post by jshen »

I hate it when YouTube channels put the subject of the video at the end of the title. It gets cropped and I can’t tell which videos are of interest to me without clicking on each one to see what it’s about.

Re: PyCon US 2021 Recordings are Available

#28

Post by qbasic_forever »

jshen wrote: post #27

I hate it when YouTube channels put the subject of the video at the end of the title. It gets cropped and I can’t tell which videos are of interest to me without clicking on each one to see what it’s about.

Agreed, hover over it if you have a mouse and the tooltip should show the full name.

Re: PyCon US 2021 Recordings are Available

#29

Post by tiew9Vii »

yuy910616 wrote: post #14

After watching this 2018 talk on typing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWV8t494N88 and this one last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST33zDM9vOE&t=68s and finally this one in 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lj_9TyT3V98 I think I'll finally start using type checking - it really seems to just eliminate a whole class of potential bugs; a class that is often not tested at that.

The thing with Python types is that they are “type hints” and not true types, hints is the keyword. There’s also two type checker implementations.

As they are hints it means you can still pass in wrong values in some situations and what types check on one implementation may not type check with the other implementation. So the types are superficial only in Python.

The paper “Python 3 types in the wild” at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26788177 is a good read. I enjoyed reading it and found it useful.

I’m a fan of types as the compiler tells me I made a mistake and blocks me making mistakes. You can use the type system to make certain errors unrepeatable (impossible to make). With that my preference is use a language where types are first class rather than a language trying to retrofit some loose form of type checking on top which is nothing more than linting.

Being a fan of strongly typed languages I was eager to use types in Python when I had to involuntarily use Python. After a few instances of putting in type hints and things type checking when they shouldn’t I mainly don’t bother with them now outside of data classes as they where not catching bugs I wanted so still getting runtime errors.

Re: PyCon US 2021 Recordings are Available

#30

Post by joshuamorton »

tiew9Vii wrote: post #29
yuy910616 wrote: post #14

After watching this 2018 talk on typing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWV8t494N88 and this one last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST33zDM9vOE&t=68s and finally this one in 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lj_9TyT3V98 I think I'll finally start using type checking - it really seems to just eliminate a whole class of potential bugs; a class that is often not tested at that.

The thing with Python types is that they are “type hints” and not true types, hints is the keyword. There’s also two type checker implementations. As they are hints it means you can still pass in wrong values in some situations and what types check on one implementation may not type check with the other implementation. So the types are superficial only in Python. The paper “Python 3 types in the wild” at https://news…

> As they are hints it means you can still pass in wrong values in some situations and what types check on one implementation may not type check with the other implementation. So the types are superficial only in Python.

Could you elaborate. When can you pass in wrong values?

The type checkers aren't always precisely the same (some do inference, mypy doesn't), but the cases where they disagree are usually because one is correct and one wants more information, not because you're able to do the wrong thing despite having annotations.

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