Heh, a younger me would definitely be walking around with a black T-shirt with:

  from functions import *

…on the front and

  @cached_property
  def troll_face(self):
    return ‘:)’

…on the back.

functools and itertools are amazing and I love them both. They are especially useful for teaching high school CS without having to stray from Python, which the kids at all levels know well and are comfortable with.

However.

Using @cached_property feels like a bad code smell and it’s a controversial design decision. The example given is more like an instance of a factory? Perhaps if the result of the render function was an Important Object™ (not just a mere string) then the function’s callers might not be so cavalier about discarding the generated instance.

I would like to see the calling code that calls `render` more than once in two different places (hence the need for caching with no option for cache invalidation?). When every stack frame is a descendant of main() then there’s no such thing as “two different places”!

    def main():
      page = HN().render()
      while ‘too true’:
        do_work(page)
        tea_break(page)

Ironically it doesn’t feel very functional.