As a heavy user of Python’s type annotations, I’m very happy with them, but I would like for them to be first class at runtime, so I can do useful and interesting things with them. The status quo is that a type annotation can be a class, a string, or a “typing special form.” I would like for a type annotation to be an object that could exist independently and be treated as a value, and this is only sometimes true.

Mainly, the seems to be no way, in a dynamic language, to dynamically check if functions get the right types.

To me, this means I don't really understand the python type hinting at all, as adding hints to just one or two functions provides no value to me at all.

I assume I must be not using them usefully, as I've tried adding type hints to some projects and they just seemed to do nothing useful.

default values! Since type hints are *hints*, it is difficult to set default values for complicated types. For instance, if you have lists, dicts, sets in the type signature, without a library like pydantic, it is difficult and non-standard. This becomes even more problematic when you start doing more complicated data structures. The configuration in this library starts to show the problems. https://koxudaxi.github.io/datamodel-code-generator/custom_t...

The issue very much is a lack of a standard for the entire language; rather than it not being possible.