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Programming Languages (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

If by «loosely typed» you mean weakly typed, then that's not true. Python is a dynamically and strongly typed language. Attempting to do an operation with incompatible types will result in a TypeError.

>>> "3" + 9
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
TypeError: can only concatenate str (not "int") to str

You may be thinking of the following, but this only works because the __mul__ and __add__ methods of these objects have been written to accept the other types.

>>> "A" * 4 + "H"
'AAAAH'

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I meant that you do not declare types and a variable's type can change at any time.

Regardless of semantics, it results in code that is not scannable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

But it is in no way worse than javascript in that regard, though?

I don't think static typing in Python is really so essential. I see it above all as a scripting language, so its applications don't benefit as much from static typing as other languages do.

Maybe a better hypothetical python would have used some kind of type inference system, like in haskell, which allows for static typing while still allowing to write code unencumbered from types and stuff, but I really think, for Python's target domain, its type system is actually adequate or good. Maybe its documentation could benefit from type hints, though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

But it is in no way worse than javascript in that regard, though?

No, but OPs original post was implying that it was better than JavaScript, when in my mind they're pretty similar in that regard, with the major exception that there is no python equivalent of Typescript which is rapidly passing JavaScript in professional settings.

I don't think static typing in Python is really so essential. I see it above all as a scripting language, so its applications don't benefit as much from static typing as other languages do.

For a scripting language it's fine, but problems arise when you start building giant applications with it (which does happen).