IdeaSift

Developers struggle to get useful types from their code tools

Developers using static typing in Python and JavaScript run into gaps: checkers may miss or reject code, factory-created clients can remain untyped, and obvious types still require manual annotations. Some also lack a convenient way to inspect inferred types while reading code. Existing checker and editor setups can help, but may require extra dependencies or leave values imprecisely typed.

For developers adding static typing to dynamic-language codebases. Mentioned from Dec 2017 to Oct 2025 on Bluesky, GitHub and Hacker News.

6 different people described this problem in 6 separate discussions.

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What people said

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  1. We tried Pyright out, and it was indeed able to typecheck parts of the codebase which mypy refused to check due to the issue in this thread. It's certainly strange adding Node as a development dependency to our project, on the flipside
  2. But we still have the issue that, since clients are created from factory methods, the type checker won't know what class your client is
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