"Should Python enforce Type-checking in the future?" Python already enforces type-checking. It is *runtime* time checking.
https://cdsmith.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/an-old-article-i-wrote/ As far as *static* type checking goes, the answer is No. (Obviously all of the following is my opinion, not holy writ.) (1) Moving mypy into CPython would be bad for both mypy and CPython. The release schedules and stability guarantees of each are different. It would require the influx of a huge amount of complexity into CPython to integrate mypy. And to save what? mypy is free, and easy to install if you have an internet connection. The benefits of integration are tiny compared to the costs. (2) Requiring static type checking would be bad for alternative implementations. Python is dominated by CPython, and we should be mildly concerned about that: languages dominated by a single implementation (like Ruby and Perl) are far more likely to lose popularity and fade away than those with many implementations (like C). Anything that makes it harder for new implementations to get started is a negative. Right now, we do have PyPy and MicroPython, both reasonably popular, but the other "big" implementations Jython and IronPython are stuck in the Python 2 world. Making it harder for them to catch up would be a negative. How hard would it be to migrate PyPy to enforced static typing? What would that do to the smaller Python implementations? How would it affect Cython and Numba and other projects? MicroPython needs to run on tiny machines with limited memory resources. It will probably never support mandatory static type checking. Running Python on tiny machines like Raspberry Pi and Arduino is a big part of the Python ecosystem, so mandatory static checking would break the language and ecosystem into what is effectively two languages: classic Python 3 and new "Python 4" with mandatory static checking. (3) Have we learned nothing from the 2-to-3 transition of the pain and extra work and disruption that a huge backward-compatibility breaking change to the language makes? Faced with a major migration from 3-to-4 that would be as big and painful as 2-to-3, many projects and libraries would just abandon Python altogether, in favour or rewriting their project in a "real" statically typed language with proper stability guarantees. We should not be talking about Python 4 here, we should be thinking Python 5000 or even Python 6000. More seriously, incremental changes to the language is fine. Massive breakage all at once, let's not repeat that. (4) Mandatory static types would be bad for students and beginners, bad for scientists, bad for casual users, and bad for system administrators who still use Python as a scripting language. It would make the language harder to use and harder to learn. Python is, not unique, but very unusual in the broad range of uses people put it to. It is a *teaching language* that can be used for professional projects. It is a *glue language* and a *scripting language* that is written by people who just want something that works and don't want to fight the compiler's type checking errors to run it. That's why dynamic type checking was invented in the first place. (5) Requiring static type checking would be bad for mypy. mypy is designed for *gradual typing*, that is, type checking when only parts of your code have static type hints. To move to a world where type hints are no longer hints but mandatory strictly enforced types would likely make a lot of mypy obsolete. It would likely take a lot of work to rip out the code that assumes gradual typing and replace it with code that strictly enforces types. (6) Requiring formal static types goes against modern language design for applications languages. Python is not a systems language like Rust. Modern applications languages tend to converge to the middle of the typing landscape: - languages with static types tend to develop ways to escape the type system and allow some dynamic typing features; e.g. Java has generics and reflection. - languages with dynamic typing tend to develop optional ways to enforce those types statically. This is, of course, exactly where Python is now. A fundamentally dynamically typed language with optional static typing features. And that's a good thing. -- Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/5GJVGEWWUB6WHY2JGQ547UIIWDZQHYCE/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
