As a developer who has primarily developed applications in Python for his entire professional career, I can't say I'm especially excited about any of the "headlining" features of 3.8.
The "walrus operator" will occasionally be useful, but I doubt I will find many effective uses for it. Same with the forced positional/keyword arguments and the "self-documenting" f-string expressions. Even when they have a use, it's usually just to save one line of code or a few extra characters.
The labeled breaks and continues proposed in PEP-3136 [0] also wouldn't be used very frequently, but they would at least eliminate multiple lines of code and reduce complexity.
PEP-3136 was rejected because "code so complicated to
require this feature is very rare". I can understand a stance like that. Over complicating a language with rarely-used features can definitely create problems. I just don't see why the three "headline" features I mentioned are any different.
The "walrus operator" will occasionally be useful, but I doubt I will find many effective uses for it. Same with the forced positional/keyword arguments and the "self-documenting" f-string expressions. Even when they have a use, it's usually just to save one line of code or a few extra characters.
The labeled breaks and continues proposed in PEP-3136 [0] also wouldn't be used very frequently, but they would at least eliminate multiple lines of code and reduce complexity.
PEP-3136 was rejected because "code so complicated to require this feature is very rare". I can understand a stance like that. Over complicating a language with rarely-used features can definitely create problems. I just don't see why the three "headline" features I mentioned are any different.
[0]: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3136/