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Typescript turned me into a believer but my gosh do python typings feel clumsy and quickly busy up files. I get why, and it’s not exactly realistic, but I wish a lot of it didn’t require an import. Whatever the solution is, it doesn’t include giving up on Python typings.
Type hints are much easier to use nowadays than they were a few years ago, because the agentic tools like Claude Code are very good at converting an existing codebase to using type hints.
The flip side of it is that Claude Code will have a very bad time in a code base with grossly unsatisfiable or conflicting types (where a type checker would fail the project). A human should always first ensure that the types are broadly correct, with or without the assistance of code tools.
If I have a function that takes an int, and I write down the requirement, why should a JIT have to learn independently of what I wrote down that the input is an int?
I get that it's this way because of how these languages evolved, but it doesn't have to stay this way.
I enforce strong types on all Python code I’m responsible for - and make sure others don’t play fast and loose with dict[str, Any] when they could use a well defined type. Doing otherwise is just asking for prod incidents.
I worked on a project that did this. Drove me absolutely nuts. It's like having all the worst parts of a dynamic language and a static language with none of the benefits. I'd much rather just work in a statically typed language from the start.
I recently had to debug someone else's Python code and trying to figure out what variables are was a massive headache, especially coming from C++.
The extra typing clarification in python makes the code harder to read. I liked python because it was easy to do something quickly and without that cognitive overhead. Type hints, and they feel like they're just hints, don't yield enough of a benefit for me to really embrace them yet.
Perhaps that's just because I don't use advanced features of IDEs. But then I am getting old :P
EDIT: also, this massively depends on what you're doing with the language! I don't have huge customer workloads to consider any longer..!