pyflakes also detects typos easily, and it's quite useful. In languages that don't catch anything you can usually still use tools for static verification.

As another example, Java may let you get NullPointerException, but FindBugs detects a lot of those.

Wow thanks, I didn't know pyflakes. I knew pylint, but will make it more of a point to run it. I only occasionally need to code in Python, but when I have to, it is legacy code that I modify.

glad to be helpful.

Depending on your editor of choice, you can get integrated pyflakes/pyling/flake8, e.g. I use vim and the syntastic plugin which is great.

This way, you get a bit of on the fly static checking without needing to remember command line tools/using vcs hooks, which is much more productive.

Will keep this in mind the next time around!

Thanks again.