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Okay, let's say (just for the sake of argument) that I'm teaching a data structures course in Python (a preposterous conceit). Any opinions on mypy vs pyre vs just not checking the type annotations at all?

@jbclements I’d not check them and instead teach students to check them by hand, to practice thinking with types.

But maybe im cruel

@wilbowma @jbclements just make them serialize everything out to protobufs — which drops type info. Then they can “invent” tags and write a safe serializer/deserializer along the way. ;-)

@wilbowma no no I'm totally on board with cruelty, help me understand which flavor you're promoting: would they be given test programs and asked to produce explanations of why they don't type-check? Actually, doing this for relatively sane functions (no HOF for instance) actually sounds quite plausible (he said before actually trying it).

@jbclements I was thinking the HTDP approach, requiring students to start with types and follow the structure of those types. However, I do think code reading exercise are super valuable if you’ve got the resources for assessing them.

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