All documentation is optional and ignored at runtime, that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. If your library doesn't have type hints I'm just not gonna use it, I don't have the time to figure out what you accept or return.

[–] legion02@lemmy.world -2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

It means they have the option to do it or not do it and you have the option to not use it, which clearly your exercising. I've personally never had a situation where a lack of type hints slowed me down even a little.

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I dunno if you're being deliberately obtuse, but just in case you really did miss his point: the fact that type hints are optional (and not especially popular) means many libraries don't have them. It's much more painful to use a library without type hints because you lose all of their many benefits.

This obviously isn't a problem in languages that require static types (Go, Rust, Java, etc..) and it isn't a problem with Typescript because static types are far more popular in JavaScript/Typescript land so it's fairly rare to run into a library that doesn't have them.

And yeah you can just not use the library at all but that's just ignoring the problem.

[–] namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

True, but if you're looking at a Python library that doesn't have type hints in 2024, then chances are that it's not very good and/or not very well maintained.

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 1 points 1 week ago

Well, indeed. Unfortunately there are still a fair number of them. The situation is definitely improving at least.