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Comment by nigma | Hacker News Reader

I'm observing Python language elements being rediscovered on HN recently. These things have been in use for a while now and I'm wondering why they are getting so much attention several years after they were first introduced.

Is this because you are new to Python (or programming in general) or because these concepts and use cases were never explained properly, or you simply like Python and up-vote related stories?

(I'm actually asking myself similar questions about PostgreSQL stories as well.)

Anyway, I encourage you to take a look at http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/index.html (and http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/index.html) from time to time.

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The problem with the Python documentation is that it does not adequately explain the value of it's more obscure features (such as coroutines). And since coroutines are obscure in general, programmers won't even know how to appreciate them once they find them (say in PEP-0342 http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0342/).

Posting articles such as this one is very helpful because it pushes useful esoteric knowledge into our consciousness. HN is particularly suited because the community's up-votes convince us that our time will be well spent looking into such articles.

The "generator tricks for systems programmers" presentation has been on HN several times. It's one of those links that seems to pop up about once a year. It's not necessarily that people are learning about them for the first time, but they think, "Hey, cool, let's talk about this."

It's not specific to Python, it seems to happen in every topic. On a related note, it would be nice to finally see that new posts of the same link would be tied to the other instances (or rejected).

The same URL can't be submitted twice. If you submit a dupe, it just gives a point to the original. Note that for the generator tricks submission, the submitter put a "?" after the URL to get it past the dupe-checker. Other tricks people play are to link to different parts of the site (say, the page containing a presentation instead of the presentation itself).

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