syntax difference

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 6:50 AM, Jim Lee <jlee54 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 06/17/2018 01:35 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 6:23 AM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> Jim Lee <jlee54 at gmail.com>:
>>>>
>>>> IMHO, trying to shoehorn static type checking on top of a dynamically
>>>> typed language shows that the wrong language was chosen for the job.
>>>
>>> I'm also saddened by the type hinting initiative. When you try to be
>>> best for everybody, you end up being best for nobody. The niche Python
>>> has successfully occupied is huge. Why risk it all by trying to take the
>>> whole cake?
>>
>> Did you complain when function annotations were introduced back in 2006?
>>
>> https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3107/
>>
>> That's TWELVE YEARS ago. Over in the Node.js world, that's ... uhh,
>> actually that's longer ago than Node.js has even been around. Another
>> trendy language is Go... oh wait, that wasn't around in 2006 either.
>>
>> Type annotations have been in Python for nearly twelve years; ten if
>> you count the actual release of Python 3.0. The thing that changed
>> more recently was that *non-type* annotations were deprecated, since
>> very few use-cases were found. When did the shoehorning happen,
>> exactly?
>>
>> ChrisA
>
> What does time have to do with anything?  I wasn't using Python in 2006.  A
> bad idea is a bad idea, regardless of *when* it was conceived.
>

You talk about "risk it all by trying to take the whole cake" as if
annotations are a change. But if they were already around before you
first met the language, then they're just part of the language. You
might as well argue against the += operator or list comprehensions.

ChrisA