The most underrated feature in Python 3 | Hacker News Reader

The most underrated feature in Python 3

blog.ionelmc.ro

96 pointsedward17 comments

I may be just a bit tired right now but I had to keep nipping to the top of the article to remind myself which was foo and which was bar.

There are good times to use foo and bar, rather than more self-documenting style placeholder names, but this was not one of them for me.

I had the same problem. My first thought was, why can't we just name them something like 'dependency' and 'app' or whatever. So much clearer.

Similarly, the author's definition of foo.py does not seem to actually define functions d, e, and f as referred to the traceback. That confused me for a bit.

Sad to see this PEP dates back to 2005, and 10 years later the majority of Python developers are still on 2.x and don't benefit from it :-/

I think the majority are using 3.x for new projects? Of course there's still a lot of 2.x around.

A lot of us who came to Python late have only ever used 3. I can't imagine the horror of dealing with multiple charsets and bytes in 2.x

You don't really have to deal with bytes in py2. That's part of the problem.

You have to. And even some http libs only use Bytes in py3. Dealing with Sockets also only works without unicode. Thats just horrible.

3years ago I would probably argue that you should just use Python 2.X. But most packages you will use are now ported to Python 3.

One issue is that almost every google search for documentation points to the 2.x version, sometimes even if you search for Python 3 meaning you have to manually find the dropdown and switch to a new version. I imagine this is cumbersome for many new developers.

It's all about what OSs ship with, and we're getting to the point where Python 3.x is the default.

Java had this feature since the last millenium (java 1.3, i think). I really miss it programming in python 2.7.

For anyone wondering: its chained exceptions.

Python's is actually a little nicer too, in 3.x - it has two types of chains, the 'root cause' one like Java, and a 'this is what I was handling when this exception happened' - to stop an error in your exception handling code hide the original error.

by reading this I just learned about the concept of chained exceptions, although I can't see why is so useful, the built-in traceback and sys module has always been good enough:

    import sys,traceback
    try:
        ...
    except Exception as ex:
        exc_type, exc_value, exc_traceback = sys.exc_info()
        logger.error("%s:%s" % (str(ex),  str(traceback.format_exception(exc_type, exc_value, exc_traceback))))
        raise MyException(" :( ")

that's not nearly good enough, it's barely acceptable. i've been programming python for a decade and the fact you have to do this with exceptions was plainly dumb. as a programmer you should never have to worry about preserving tracebacks.

Great post. I'm a python dev and had never noticed that.

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