Tests aren’t enough: Case study after adding type hints to urllib3

Post by jonny_eh » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 5:40 PM UTC

novok wrote: post #6

tester756 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's $current_year and there's still debate whether checking stuff at compilation time is better than at runtime?

People who don't think types are a good thing need to work in a statically typed language for a year or two and then see what a difference it makes in reality. Unproductive Java bureaucracy != static typing. I think the people debating it never tried it seriously.

Post by taeric » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

nllsh wrote: post #25

taeric wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been alive long enough to see that most things are useful, and all things are oversold. More, the nice easy things to build with major restrictions pretty much gets thrown out the window for complicated things that have constraints that most efforts don't have. This isn't just a software thing. Building a little shed outside? Would be silly to use the same rigor that goes into a high rise. Which would be crazy t…

Not that I disagree, but I feel like you are overselling the simplicity of [building a shed]( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding ).

Post by zz865 » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

dado3212 wrote: post #7

Honestly will never go back to languages without type checking, it prevents so many bugs and is a huge help in understanding code you haven’t worked with previously.

Post by kennywinker » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

jfabre wrote: post #28

david422 wrote: post #19

I love static typing/type hints if for only 1 thing - code maintenance. Even code I wrote six months ago. Not having to dig through 6 functions deep to try to figure out whether "person" is a string, or an object, and if it's an object what attributes it has on it etc. is huge. And not to mention that some clever people decide - hey, if you pass a string I'll look up the person object - so you can pass an object or a…

I never understood this argument. In what kind of shop are you working that passing a string named person to a method expecting an object is tolerated. Or even passing different types that don't share a common interface. This would never fly in a code review in any of the companies I've worked for.

    function find_user(person) {
        if user is string {
            query_by_name(person)
        } else {
            query_by_name(person.name)
        }
    }

Post by handrous » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

david422 wrote: post #19

I love static typing/type hints if for only 1 thing - code maintenance. Even code I wrote six months ago. Not having to dig through 6 functions deep to try to figure out whether "person" is a string, or an object, and if it's an object what attributes it has on it etc. is huge. And not to mention that some clever people decide - hey, if you pass a string I'll look up the person object - so you can pass an object or a…