mypy VS yapf

It's got type annotations and mypy has a discussion about it here as well: https://github.com/python/mypy/issues/1282

There is already an AOT compiler for Python: Nuitka[0]. But I don't think it's much faster.

And then there is mypyc[1] which uses mypy's static type annotations but is only slightly faster.

And various other compilers like Numba and Cython that work with specialized dialects of Python to achieve better results, but then it's not quite Python anymore.

[0] https://nuitka.net/

[1] https://github.com/python/mypy/tree/master/mypyc

In Python there is MyPy that can help with this. https://www.mypy-lang.org/

It's funny you should say this.

Reading this article prompted me to future-proof a program I maintain for fun that deals with time; it had one use of utcnow, which I fixed.

And then I tripped over a runtime type problem in an unrelated area of the code, despite the code being green under "mypy --strict". (and "100% coverage" from tests, except this particular exception only occured in a "# pragma: no-cover" codepath so it wasn't actually covered)

It turns out that because of some core decisions about how datetime objects work, `datetime.date.today() < datetime.datetime.now()` type-checks but gives a TypeError at runtime. Oops. (cause discussed at length in https://github.com/python/mypy/issues/9015 but without action for 3 years)

One solution is apparently to use `datetype` for type annotations (while continuing to use `datetime` objects at runtime): https://github.com/glyph/DateType

PEP 695 is great. I've been using mypy every day at work in last couple years or so with very strict parameters (no any type etc) and I have experience writing real life programs with Rust, Agda, and some Haskell before, so I'm familiar with strict type systems. I'm sure many will disagree with me but these are my very honest opinions as a professional who uses Python types every day:

* Some types are better than no types. I love Python types, and I consider them required. Even if they're not type-checked they're better than no types. If they're type-checked it's even better. If things are typed properly (no any etc) and type-checked that's even better. And so on...

* Having said this, Python's type system as checked by mypy feels like a toy type system. It's very easy to fool it, and you need to be careful so that type-checking actually fails badly formed programs.

* The biggest issue I face are exceptions. Community discussed this many times [1] [2] and the overall consensus is to not check exceptions. I personally disagree as if you have a Python program that's meticulously typed and type-checked exceptions still cause bad states and since Python code uses exceptions liberally, it's pretty easy to accidentally go to a bad state. E.g. in the linked github issue JukkaL (developer) claims checking things like "KeyError" will create too many false positives, I strongly disagree. If a function can realistically raise a "KeyError" the program should be properly written to accept this at some level otherwise something that returns type T but 0.01% of the time raises "KeyError" should actually be typed "Raises[T, KeyError]".

* PEP 695 will help because typing things particularly is very helpful. Often you want to pass bunch of Ts around but since this is impractical some devs resort to passing "dict[str, Any]"s around and thus things type-check but you still get "KeyError" left and right. It's better to have "SomeStructure[T]" types with "T" as your custom data type (whether dataclass, or pydantic, or traditional class) so that type system has more opportunities to reject bad programs.

* Overall, I'm personally very optimistic about the future of types in Python!

[1] https://github.com/python/mypy/issues/1773

# is fixed: https://github.com/python/mypy/issues/12987.

You probably already know but you can add type hints and then check for consistency with https://github.com/python/mypy in python.

Modern Python with things like https://learnpython.com/blog/python-match-case-statement/ + mypy + Ruff for linting https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff can get pretty good results.

I found typed dataclasses (https://docs.python.org/3/library/dataclasses.html) in python using mypy to give me really high confidence when building data representations.

YAPF (Yet Another Python Formatter): YAPF takes a different approach in that it’s based off of ‘clang-format’, a popular formatter for C++ code. YAPF reformats Python code so that it conforms to the style guide and looks good.

I think I agree about the testing and labor of complicated translation rules.

But it doesn't appear that almost every pretty printer uses the Wadler pretty printing paper. It seems like MOST of them don't?

e.g. clang-format is one of the biggest and best, and it has a model that includes "unwrapped lines", a "layouter", a line break cost function, exhaustive search with memoization, and Dijikstra's algorithm:

https://llvm.org/devmtg/2013-04/jasper-slides.pdf

The YAPF Python formatter is based on this same algorithm - https://github.com/google/yapf

The Dart formatter used a model of "chunks, rules, and spans"

https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/09/08/the-hardest-pr...

It almost seems like there are 2 camps -- the functional algorithms for functional/expression-based languages, and other algorithms for more statement-based languages.

Though I guess Prettier/JavaScript falls on the functional side.

I just ran across this survey on lobste.rs and it seems to cover the functional pretty printing languages influenced by Wadler, but functional style, but not the other kind of formatter ("Google" formatters perhaps)

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.01530.pdf

To get all your code into a consistent format the next step is to run a formatter. I recommend black, the well-known uncompromising code formatter, which is the most popular choice. Alternatives to black are autoflake, prettier and yapf, if you do not agree with blacks constraints.

Use yapf to format code -> https://github.com/google/yapf

Google is surprisingly rigorous when it comes to code formatting. I have been a software engineer at Amazon and it was nothing like what the book says happens at Google. So the conventions you see for python docstring formatting are primarily designed to integrate with Google's internal tooling. By using docstrings following the Google conventions, you will ultimately end up with automated documentation and other fancy automated things (like type checking which they did in the docstring before there were type hints). Also notably, Google has an open source python formatting tool that they use internally called YAPF (which stands for "Yet Another Python Formatter". So if you really want to go all-in on Google python style, grab that, too.

https://github.com/google/yapf has configs, do ctrl+f SPLIT_COMPLEX_COMPREHENSION in the readme

Only as recommendation: If the lines of the source code (here: you C code you aim to document) are kept short, in manageable bytes (similar to entries parser.add_argument in Clark's "Tiny Python Projects", example seldomly pass beyond the frequently recommended threshold of 80 characters/line), reporting with listings becomes easier (equally, the reading of the difference logs/views by git and vimdiff), than with lines of say 120 characters per line. Though we no longer are constrained to 80 characters per line by terminals/screens and punch cards (when Fortran still was FORTRAN), this is a reason e.g., yapf for Python allows you to choose between 4 spaces/indentation (PEP8 style), or 2 spaces/indentation (Google style).

There is also a formatter for Python files called yapf that your team can use to avoid arguing over formatting conventions. Plus, Google also provides a settings file for Vim, noting that the default settings should be enough if you're using Emacs.