Are Type Hints glorified unit tests?

The Python programing language is pretty lax in the coding style. You can build your application using just plain functions or only classes, or a mix of both. There’s no explicit privacy model and this can be quite confusing for developers with a Java or C++ background.

This flexibility is part of the reason why Python is so successful. My mother which is a statistician and never learned Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) is happily using Python with an enormous amount of small functions and could not care less about classes and modules. She just happily uses her pile or functions.

This freedom is also why the language is sometimes seen as not suitable for building large applications, pointing to its lack of safeguards. But the truth is that you can build pretty much anything as long as you have a good strategy on how your code base is growing.

I’ve written about this 15 years ago in one of my books and I think this is still true today.

Entering Type Annotations

Following an interesting conversation on LinkedIn about type annotations, I felt the need to think about this topic again. If you don’t know what are types annotations, you can read the official Python documentation

This feature is controversial in the community because it drastically changes how coding in Python feels and looks. Some folks hate it, some love it.

Although, adding hints in your code offers some interesting features and the promise that it will have fewer bugs if you run Mypy or pytype against your code – or even in IDEs like PyCharm.

I’ve been building large applications in Python for a long time and never needed them. So I tried to ask myself if using type annotations would have made my life easier.

Can type annotations help build, grow, and maintain large Python applications?

For me, it’s quite hard to measure, to be honest, because I’ve developed over the years some software design strategies that are not using them and that seems to work well. And when they don’t work, it’s a signal for me to drop Python and use another language.

Gregory Smith who works at Google and is a prominent Python dev contributor has replied to my LinkedIn post with this:

Meanwhile our 100+ million line Python code base with a
significant portion of things statically analyzed by pytype
and most recent code authors including annotations by default
continues to prevent bugs and make it easier to maintain
the code.


Data from practical experience disagrees with your opinion.

My immediate reaction was – “I really want to see that code base! Too bad it’s not open sourced” – my speculation is that these 100 million lines of code have been around for over a decade, and require a lot of work for keeping its tech debt under control.

Pytype can check your code and find issues using inference I love the fact that it can work on unannotated code as well.

But Greg’s last part about starting to include annotation to prevent bugs strikes me because this is exactly the argument some developers use to explain the superiority of statistically typed language where the compiler (and here pytype) will catch some problems. The compiler would prevent a specific set of problems similar to what fuzz testing does.

If you push this logic to its extreme, you can use Ada. The nature of the language and its deep compile-time checks make a program that survives the compiling steps rock solid. Tests in this context can focus on happy paths and make sure the application works as advertised. Today, Ada is still used to build applications to launch rockets or control planes because there’s so little room for bugs. Rust is also a great language for writing safe code, in particular memory-safe code.

But back to Python, if annotations are just used to prevent bugs, should they be considered as a new DSL to automate a range of tests against your code?

This is the example the project provides:

def annotated(x: int, y: float = 0.0) -> int:
    return x + y

Pytype will detect the problem and complain that the function returns a float instead of an int. If you don’t use type hints, the same function would look like this and you would miss the problem for sure unless you have a specific assertion in your tests:

def not_annotated(x, y=0.0): 
    return x + y 

def test_not_annotated():
    assert isinstance(not_annotated(3), int)

The bigger question is the reason why the developer added the type annotation -> int . If there’s an incentive to make sure the function returns an int and nothing else, there must be a very good reason and hopefully, it’s covered in some tests that are more sophisticated than the test_annotated example I gave.

So for me, it begs the question: are type annotations just extra unit tests that have migrated closer to your code?