Comment by Timon3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Timon3 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> If the PSF ran a poll for the most-wanted type checking features, I don't think this would come close to first. This sounds very niche. The people working on typing seemed very busy in the last few versions.

Sure, but while it's not possible to type basic functions like ones that concatenate tuples, I can say that Pythons typing system is not superior to Typescripts.

> Returning errors as values isn't really how you're supposed to use Python though.

Okay, so how am I supposed to handle non-exceptional errors? Because using exceptions for that kind of thing absolutely isn't good practice.

> And why is there a second tuple-based format that does the same thing?

Legacy. Typescript allows me to do refactoring of things like these step by step and very easily. Python doesn't, because it's inflexible.

> It also smells slightly off that the rest of the code takes an object that's exactly similar to the first function's result, but with a transformation uniformly applied over the values. Shouldn't the first part's output and the second part's inputs both be clearly declared independently of each other? And then wouldn't it be an extremely niche case that both types are identical except for one transformation applied to all values? Is it worth the language complexity and a dedicated function?

Are we taking apart my code now or what? I can't stop the world and focus only on refactoring things to be neat and tidy for months on end. But I can improve individual parts, bit by bit - and in a language with a better typing system, I can do so way easier.

> Sure, but while it's not possible to type basic functions like ones that concatenate tuples, I can say that Pythons typing system is not superior to Typescripts.

That's not really fair. The uses that make sense when considering Python's convention ("Pythonic" code, nebulous but usually well-understood) are supported.

I think what confused me about these examples is that they imply multiple values that have completely different meanings, but all get processed as equals anyway. That was before you talked about refactoring old code though.

> Okay, so how am I supposed to handle non-exceptional errors? Because using exceptions for that kind of thing absolutely isn't good practice.

If an operation on a homogeneous collection can say "nope" for some values and process others, the values would be typed "T | None". If the data isn't really a collection but a structured mapping, in general, attributes would be made optional on a case-by-case basis. If all attributes happen to be optional but the mapping itself is non-optional, that sounds more like an accident of this specific case than something we should complicate a language over. If this happens over a whole codebase, I guess I feel for you. Maybe that's when it makes sense to give up a bit of static typing and treat these values a bit more like data and a bit less like separate arguments, no matter what kind of complicated typing the language can do.

> Legacy. Typescript allows me to do refactoring of things like these step by step and very easily. Python doesn't, because it's inflexible.

> Are we taking apart my code now or what?

Honestly yes, this example seems so unusual that it doesn't make sense to debate it without knowing concretely what's happening in your code that this needs to be supported.

I guess that this specific example would get easier. But I would hardly call one type system superior over that.

Edit: my final opinion on this is "this is something that's technically possible if you follow language and conventions to the letter, but with experience you see that it's a bad idea that won't fit well with the language and you should change the design to avoid it". It happens in all languages IMO.

> That's not really fair. The uses that make sense when considering Python's convention ("Pythonic" code, nebulous but usually well-understood) are supported.

You're focussing on a very specific part of what I wrote. Just because my specific example consists of a Result type being transformed into a Tuple, it doesn't mean that the basic use case of "concatenate two tuple types" is so far out there.

> f an operation on a homogeneous collection can say "nope" for some values and process others, the values would be typed "T | None". If the data isn't really a collection but a structured mapping, in general, attributes would be made optional on a case-by-case basis. If all attributes happen to be optional but the mapping itself is non-optional, that sounds more like an accident of this specific case than something we should complicate a language over. If this happens over a whole codebase, I guess I feel for you. Maybe that's when it makes sense to give up a bit of static typing and treat these values a bit more like data and a bit less like separate arguments, no matter what kind of complicated typing the language can do.

But the static typing is extremely helpful, it prevents many kinds of errors. Not being able to use it for these kinds of things makes Python a worse language, no matter how you cut it (in the sense that it would be a better language if you could).

> Honestly yes, this example seems so unusual that it doesn't make sense to debate it without knowing concretely what's happening in your code that this needs to be supported.

Again, my specific example doesn't matter. The use case is "function takes in two tuple types and returns a concatenated version". That's something a type system should be able to handle.

> I guess that this specific example would get easier. But I would hardly call one type system superior over that.

On what metric besides expressiveness would you rate type systems?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com