Should i annotate types everywhere? [closed]

Question

Should i annotate types in my unit tests functions? What also with overridden django methods like save and get or post functions in generic view?

Answer 1

This is arguably an opinion question but I think that there is a generally accepted answer, which is roughly "No".

One way of categorising programming languages is into statically typed and dynamically typed. Statically typed languages are generally more robust, especially for "programming in the large", and dynamically typed languages have advantages ito programming speed, and in modelling problems where it is beneficial to be able to accept data of various types. Type hints try to strike a balance. The rough rule being: if you are using the dynamic nature of the language to achieve something, don't worry about annotating it. If however, you are writing code that doesn't make specific use of the dynamic nature of the language, annotate

Perhaps to make the point clear, consider that if you DO annotate everything, well then why not just use Cython? Same effort but you actually get some speed up as well. The reason people use Python with annotations instead of Cython is that some problems are naturally better solved without specifying types.