edwardjxli
Joined 3 years ago
Karma
156
Submissions
6
Member since
May 4
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
In that example I gave, I totally agree with you. One area where I find walrus operators kinda useful is with dealing with iterators. For example,
'''
iterable = iter(thing)
while val := next(iterable, None): print(val)
'''
is a lot cleaner in my opinion compared to
'''
iterable = iter(thing)
val = next(iterable, None) while val is not None: print(val) val = next(iterable, None)
'''
Reason why I did not use this example outright was because I wasn't sure if people were familiar with the iter api, so I just chose a simpler example for the blog.
Comment · 1 year ago
Hey yall! Original author of the blog here!
I did not expect to wake up at 4am seeing my post on front page HN, but here we are nevertheless :D
As the intro mentioned, these started off as 14 small tweets I wrote a month prior to starting my blog. When I finally got that set up, I just thought, "hey, I just spent the better part of two weeks writing these nifty Python tricks, might as well reuse them as a fun first post!"
That's why the flow might seem a little weird (as some pointed out, proxy properties are not really a Python "feature" in of itself). They were just whatever I found cool that day. I tried to find something more esoteric if it was a Friday, and something useful if it was a Monday. I was also kinda improving the entire series as it was going on, so that was also a factor.
Same goes with the title. These were just 14 feature I found interesting while writing Python both professionally and as a hobby. Some people mentioned these are not very "advanced" per se, and fair enough. I think I spent a total of 5 second thinking of a title. Oh well!
To be clear, I'm not expecting people to start adding generics to their quick hacked together Python scripts (in fact please don't do that). Instead, if you're building a library or maintaining a larger Python codebase, a lot of these start becoming very useful. A lot of the typing features I mentioned are already used by Python under the hood, and that a lot of Python developers just take for granted.
Case in point, the python-opencv (https://github.com/opencv/opencv-python) library has basically no types and it's an absolute pain to work with.
BTW thats a really good SO thread, thanks for linking it!