> The Python type system is pretty bad

Coming from the perspective of a religious python hater, their type hints are better than what you give credit for: Supports generics, nominative, structural, unions, bottom type, and literals.

What is missing is mainstream adoption in libraries which is a matter of time.

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lmm 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

Optional typing is always a castle built on sand. I don't see Python typing ever becoming reliable, because there's no way you can retrofit the entire ecosystem that thoroughly.

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maleldil 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

> What is missing is mainstream adoption in libraries which is a matter of time.

I don't think that's a big problem anymore. Between typeshed and typing's overall momentum, most libraries have at least decent typing and those that don't often have typed alternatives.

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Chris_Newton 7 months ago | parent [-]

I don't think that's a big problem anymore.

ORMs have entered the chat…

These sometimes use a lot of dynamic modification, such as adding implicit ID fields or adding properties to navigate a relationship with another type that is defined in code only from the other side.

It can also be awkward to deal with “not null” database fields if the way the ORM model classes are defined means fields are nullable as far as the Python type hints are concerned, yet the results of an actual database query should never have a null value there. Guarding against None every time you refer to one of them is tedious.

I’m not exactly the world’s loudest advocate for ORMs anyway, but on projects that also try to take type safety seriously, they do seem to be a bit of a dark corner within the Python ecosystem.

	▲	never_inline 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		The approach I have found to work is isolate the logic which deals with ORM models, and convert them to/from typed models (eg pydantic) at the function boundary. with sqlalchemy mapped_column, its less of an issue. django, otoh, seems too much magic for static type. (happy to be proven wrong).