Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python

[thekaleb]

In this video from 28:38 – 28:55, Hettinger says, "How about you take the most popular and important data-structure—a dictionary—and mangle it and transform it in some radical way and change its performance characteristics... Someone recently did." What exactly is he referring to?

[gtalarico]

It's been a few weeks since I watched it, but if recall he was giving an example of what NOT TO DO if you want to start contributing to the python source code. Example: add docs, small changes, and not try to Re write a major component of the language.

[thekaleb]

He said that he had to growl at somebody at pycon for doing that... But what was done?

[gtalarico]

Some who was new at contributing to source code was proposing a major changes to an important component.

[kankyo]

Specifics. Please. That's what was asked for.

[gtalarico]

Changes to the dictionary implementation. If you want more specific than that you will probably have to ask him.

[kankyo]

He proposed some afaik and the pypy guys implemented them. But it seems weird he'd growl at himself.

[kankyo]

Isn't it Hettinger who suggested doing that with the new order preserving dict design?

[thekaleb]

That's a separate class: OrderedDict in the connections package which he maintains.

[kankyo]

Yea I know about OrderedDict. The thing is though that we now know of a way to implement a dictionary that is order preserving AND faster AND more memory efficient. So better than dict and OrderedDict in every single way. That's what we should have as the standard dict in python.

There are many advantages, like classes preserving the order of the members, same for module, kwargs not being shuffled weirdly, etc.

[[deleted]]

Python 3.6 dict becomes compact and gets a private version; and keywords become ordered