Functional Python Programming 2e -- Now With Type Hints

Functional Python Programming, 2nd ed.

This has been fun to cleanup some rambling, reset the math to be sure it's actually right.

And.

Type Hints.

Almost every example has had type hints added.

(And I raised the pylint scores be rearranging some spacing and what-not.)

Bonus. We will be moving the publication date up from June to possibly April. We're still doing technical reviews and what-not, so things aren't *done*.

What was hardest?

Generics, specifically, decorators can have quite complex type hints. Indeed, type hinting raises important questions about trying to write super-generic functions that can handle too wide a spectrum of types.

def some_function(arg):
    if isinstance(arg, dict):
        do_something(arg)
    elif isinstance(arg, list):
        do_something({i: v for i, v in enumerate(arg)})
    else: 
        do_something(dict(arg=arg))

This kind of thing turns out to be ill-advised. It's probably a bad design. More importantly, it's difficult to annotate, making it difficult to discern if it behaves correctly.

In this case, the argument is Union[Dict, Sequence, Any]. I've got a few examples of Union types, but they're rare because I'm not a fan in the first place. And the few places I used them, the complexity of getting past mypy type checks showed that they add risk and cost without a dramatic reduction in complexity.

In this specific case, the some_function() function is merely a type-converting wrapper around the do_something() function. It's probably better to refactor the type conversion responsibility into the clients of some_function().

The arguments about "encapsulation" or "the client shouldn't know that detail" are generally kind of silly. We're all adults here, we generally have to know what's going on with respect to the conversions in order to use the function correctly and write unit tests.