Comment by JonChesterfield | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JonChesterfield | Hacker News Reader

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JonChesterfield

Is anyone able to summarise how python got to this point? I haven't used it seriously since the tail end of the 2.7 woes but liked it a lot back then. Good native dictionary type and first class closures worked for me. Scattering of unit tests. The type annotation idea always seemed inconsistent with the language to me so I've ignored it.

In particular I'm wondering if this is a consequence of the rumours that python scales badly - someone changes some module far away, runs the massive test suite and it passes, checks in their code, and your code promptly blows up because the interaction wasn't tested.

There also seems to be a current enthusiasm for statically typing everything on hackernews which might be reflective of the wider industry, possibly making python acceptable collateral damage as it was on the wrong side.

That's my conjecture though, would love to hear from someone closer to the game how type hints became such a big deal in the python world.

My understanding is that Python is used by millions of people to write programs measured in tens of lines, and by tens of large companies writing millions of lines.

Many in the first group are happy with dynamic typing. Those in the second group would have been better off with a compiled language but are too invested in Python to switch to something different, so are trying to morph Python itself into something different.

Unfortunately, the way Python’s governance works, all decisions about the future of the language are made by people in the second group. For example, IIRC the Python Steering Council is composed entirely of developers working for large tech companies - no scientists, finance workers etc at all.

My theory is that huge code bases are always more error prone then small code bases. And if a language is controlled by a committee they will destroy it.

> I'm wondering if this is a consequence of the rumours that python scales badly

My (completely uninformed) guess is that people want to statically type all the things not because it improves correctness, but because it makes editor facilities like code completion and jump-to-documentation so much more effective.

Web devs, same reason asyncio got railroaded through.

Python is increasingly trying to cater to the extremely online and loud webdev crowd. Living in an ivory tower is fine if you're inside it.

At first glance this is a pretty odd take, would you mind elaborating? I wouldn't say Python devs and web devs have any more overlap than web devs and some other random group of devs you could select, so why is it the case here? It's always easy to say that it's [outgroup]'s fault that [ingroup] is going sour, but is it really the case?

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