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You don't even need it afterward, unless you want a file to be both an importable module and an executable script.

Arguably you could be a happy Python programmer without this capability.

I never understood why people bother with this when writing their python main file, which is never going to be imported because it doesn't make sense in the first place.

Because I dislike interspersing executable statements at module level with function definitions. I’d rather have all code live inside functions and have one main entry point for the script. It’s just a personal preference, nothing wrong with not doing that though.

But you could have a single main() call without the if statement, couldn't you?

REPL-based development. You might be developing a script, but notice a bug. If you import your script as a module, you can run the function you’re debugging, figure out what’s wrong, edit the file, and then reimport the module (using importlib.reload).

Okay, that's quite convincing, thanks!

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