The Python IAQ: Infrequently Answered Questions

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34 points·psoto··7 comments

A lot of the points here are really quite out of date. (For example, defaultdict has been part of the stdlib since 2.5, and namedtuple since 2.6.)

Funny, those were the same two I noticed.

The document says it was written shortly before Python 2.5, which came out in September 2006. So it's probably about 9 years old.

Indeed, it would be less confusing if the submission title had a "(2006)" suffix.

In addition, we now have enums (Since Python 3.4) and an equivalent to the ternary operator (val1 if condition else val2).

An Abstract Base Class module (abc) was added in 2.6 as well. https://docs.python.org/2/library/abc.html

A number of these answers are highly unidiomatic, symptoms of people coming from another language to Python. Trying to shoe horn one language's patterns into another is fraught with problems, not only are you going to be less effective in the new language but experienced coders of that language are going to hate working with your code.

Raymond Hettinger's PyCon 2015 talk "Beyond PEP 8 -- Best practices for beautiful intelligible code" has an excellent example of a Java -> Python case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M

Which answers in particular?

I thought most of the answers were quite prescient of features that would be introduced to the standard library some years later.

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