[Python-ideas] Suggestion for standardized annotations

[Paul Moore]

On 5 March 2014 11:53, Cem Karan <cfkaran2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thoughts/suggestions?

I think the core/stdlib position is that agreeing conventions would be
better done once some real world experience of the practical issues
and benefits of annotations has been established. So while a proposal
like this is not without merit, it needs to be considered in the light
of how projects actually use annotations. Personally, I'm not aware of
any libraries that make significant use of annotations, so a good
first step would be to survey existing use, and summarise it here.
That would allow you to clarify your proposal in terms of exactly how
existing projects would need to modify their current code.

Of course, there's likely a chicken and egg problem here - projects
may be holding off using annotations through fear of issues caused by
clashes. But I'm not sure that a UUID-based proposal like the above
(which as you admit is very verbose, and not particularly user
friendly) would be more likely to encourage use.

If I were developing a library that would benefit from annotations, at
this point in time I'd probably just choose whatever conventions
suited me and go with those - likely marking the feature as "subject
to change" initially. Then, when people raised bug reports or feature
requests that asked for better interoperability, I'd look at how to
achieve that in conjunction with the other project(s) that clashed
with me.

Paul