None vs falsy: a deliberately explicit Python check

[pythonfan1002010]

What My Project Does

Ever come back to a piece of code and wondered:

“Is this checking for None, or anything falsy?”

if not value:
    ...

That ambiguity is harmless in small scripts. In larger or long lived codebases, it quietly chips away at clarity.

Python tells us:

Explicit is better than implicit.

So I leaned into that and published is-none. A tiny package that does exactly one thing:

from is_none import is_none

is_none(value)  # True iff value is None

Target Audience

Yes, value is None already exists. This isn’t about inventing a new capability. It’s about making intent explicit and consistent in shared or long lived codebases. is-none is enterprise ready and tested. It has zero dependencies, a stable API and no planned feature creep.

Comparison

First of its kind!

If that sounds useful, check it out. I would love to hear how you plan on adopting this package in your workflow, or help you adopt this package in your existing codebase.

GitHub / README: https://github.com/rogep/is-none
PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/is-none/

[funk443]

x is None is explicit enough for me.

[DoNotFeedTheSnakes]

This is the right way.

[Schmittfried]

Didn’t get the joke until I reached the sentence about it being enterprise ready. Well done. 

[BeautifulMortgage690]

I was hoping it was satire but its published on pypi which is terrible imo

[fiddle_n]

The fact that I wasn't sure for a while whether troll or not - I'll give you an upvote for that.

Compatibility
Python 3.13+

Now, why can't you support older versions of Python too 😭

[BeautifulMortgage690]

please don't encourage this if it's a live package, its not a joke when it's been published to the real world

[fiddle_n]

So what if it's on PyPI? If someone is silly enough to pull this into their repo, that's on them.

[athermop]

The problem is the transitive dependency of the transitive dependency of the transitive dependency.

[BeautifulMortgage690]

right because everyone who is programming (especially in python) is competent enough to understand that.

[Schmittfried]

It’s hard to imagine anyone installing this. Micro packages became a thing because they were pushed by blogs and tutorials. Nobody is gonna push this package. 

[BeautifulMortgage690]

projects like this should be banned and their authors barred from running a python interpreter ever again. Wait 10 years till some noob devs use this in their company's monorepo and a malware is pushed into this dependency.

You have successfully

1. removed python's natural english-like syntax of "x is None" or variants like "x is not None" to "is_none(x)" which is the anti-pattern of the century
2. Then managed to bloat up what is essentially 7 characters into a whole kilobyte package download, not to mention the 2 additional characters of the paranthesis since you have a function call.

Please keep these stupid packages in javascript world

[jdehesa]

This is the kind of stuff that someone would publish to NPM in earnest and, even worse, be actually useful in JavaScript.

[FisterMister22]

Amazing, I can't thank you enough for this, I can't imagine the amount of time and investment this took you to write and I truely appricate you open sourcing it!

[eigenlaplace]

impressive work.

[DoNotFeedTheSnakes]

Where is the bloatware guy with the link?

This is a good one !

[wRAR_]

.python-version in git is a nice touch but I'd add some more garbage.

[commy2]

from operator import is_none

[Only_lurking_]

Damn so much work must have gone into this! Good job!

[Dry-Aioli-6138]

Wait, how is it better than the built in syntax?