this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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I have next to no experience with TypeScript, but want to make a case in defence of Python: Python does not pretend to have any kind of type safety, and more or less actively encourages duck typing.
Now, you can like or dislike duck typing, but for the kind of quick and dirty scripting or proof of concept prototyping that I think Python excels at, duck typing can help you get the job done much more efficiently.
In my opinion, it's much more frustrating to work with a language that pretends to be type safe while not being so.
Because of this, I regularly turn off the type checking on my python linter, because it's throwing warnings about "invalid types", due to incomplete or outdated docs, when I know for a fact that the function in question works with whatever type I'm giving it. There is really no such thing as an "invalid type" in Python, because it's a language that does not intend to be type-safe.
That's entirely fair for the usecase of a small script or plugin, or even a small website. I'd quickly get annoyed with Python if I had to use it for a larger project though.
TypeScript breaks down when you need it for a codebase that's longer than a few thousand lines of code. I use pure JavaScript in my personal website and it's not that bad. At work where the frontend I work on has 20,000 lines of TypeScript not including the HTML files, it's a massive headache.
I wholeheartedly agree: In my job, I develop mathematical models which are implemented in Fortran/C/C++, but all the models have a Python interface. In practice, we use Python as a "front end". That is: when running the models to generate plots or tables, or whatever, that is done through Python, because plotting and file handling is quick and easy in Python.
I also do quite a bit of prototyping in Python, where I quickly want to throw something together to check if the general concept works.
We had one model that was actually implemented in Python, and it took less than a year before it was re-implemented in C++, because nobody other than the original dev could really use it or maintain it. It became painfully clear how much of a burden python can be once you have a code base over a certain size.