this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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Duck typing is the best if fully embraced. But it also means you have to worry just a little bit about clean failures once the project grows a little. I like this better than type checking relentlessly.
It also means that your test suite or doctests or whatever should throw some unexpected types around now and again to check how it handles ducks and chickens and such :)
I have to be honest in that, while I think duck typing should be embraced, I have a hard time seeing how people are actually able to deal with large-scale pure Python projects, just because of the dynamic typing. To me, it makes reading code so much more difficult when I can't just look at a function and immediately see the types involved.
Because of this, I also have a small hangup with examples in some C++ libraries that use
auto. Like sure, I'm happy to useautowhen writing code, but when reading an example I would very much like to immediately be able to know what the return type of a function is. In general, I think the use ofautoshould be restricted to cases where it increases readability, and not used as a lazy way out of writing out the types, which I think is one of the benefits of C++ vs. Python in large projects.Generally speaking, I like duck typing for function inputs, but not as much for function outputs (unless the functions are pure mathematics).