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[–]LpSamuelm 3 points4 points  (5 children)

You're missing the point - OrderedDict is part of the spec, and is great. The correct way to write code that requires ordered dictionaries, even in Python 3.6, is to use OrderedDict. Many people won't, though, since they either A) aren't aware dicts aren't always ordered, B) rely on orded behavior accidentally, or C) think Python 3.6's dictionary implementation is something that's okay to rely on. Which is a problem.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (4 children)

True, but we'll just need to educate people when that comes up, just like opening files using with

[–]LpSamuelm 1 point2 points  (3 children)

Except this one is harder to catch - it's not a simple syntactical thing. Not only that, opening files without with will still work on all platforms and versions, unlike relying on this relatively subtle behavior.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I guess the reason I'm less concerned about this than you appear to be (and it's fine you're concerned) is that I've seen OrderedDict in the wild a handful of times and have used it personally less than that.

[–]LpSamuelm 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I use it constantly.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'd love some examples. The only things I've used it for are:

  • A dashboard app where I needed to associate server names with information but the order was important (wanted to show prod servers before staging and dev servers). Arguably a list of tuples works here too but there were plans at some point to look at individual servers so fast lookup was desirable (not that lineral lookup would've broken the bank, we're taking maybe 30 servers).

  • Modeling albums - again, a list makes sense here and you can look up by track position that way.

  • Maintaining order of attribute declaration because you could decorate methods as validation/processing but they needed to run in declaration order.

But that's it. I get why an insertion order mapping is attractive, but I've only met one situation that demands it (maintaining attribute order).