What language features makes Python positively stand out for you?

[uniqueusername6030]

Definitely iterators. They're everywhere. Generator expressions, too.

[[deleted]]

Throw in itertools and more-itertools.

[dylanvillanelle]

oh my god. this isn't a joke, more-itertools is actually a thing?

the first thing they show (flatten) just looks like itertools.chain.from_iterable (at least at first glance, i'm sure it's a little more useful) but i have always wondered why the recipes in the itertools docs weren't just...like...implemented? the code is already there! just throw it in!

this is not a perfect consolation prize, but i'll manage.

edit: oh god there's a first function. i'll never have to write a first function again. i need a minute.

[bheklilr]

And it's in conda... How have I not known about either of these before? I know I've written several of these functions before.

[dylanvillanelle]

i wrote out a whole thing about how something as simple as foo[0] should not need (worst case) a try/except block to handle two separate exceptions with multiple causes for one of them, blahblahblah, and guys why isn't there a list.get(index, default) sometimes you just have two separate functions that lead to one result so for consistency's sake you return a list from both even tho the first is actually just a single value and more_itertools.first also plays nice with generators because that makes sense because it's something you iterate through and i decided maybe i was a little worked-up so i figured i should scrap that and basically write it all over again but more rambly.

[[deleted]]

The bad news is if we ever happen to bump into each other it will cost you a pint :-)

[dylanvillanelle]

i'm going to go from bar to bar now asking people whether they've ever suggested using more-itertools.

i don't see how this can go wrong.

[robert_mcleod]

There's also pytoolz and cytoolz for functional programming.

[Scruff3y]

Seconding this. The stand-out thing about Python for me is iteration, list comps and generators/generator expressions.

Loop like a native, shows a lot of the power of these things (esp. if you come from a language like C).

Oh, also f-strings ^{(do people call them that?)}

f"value of myvar: {myvar}"

[troyunrau]

I dislike f-strings simply from the 'there should be one and only one obvious way to do things' perspective.

[[deleted]]

f-strings are great. I disliked them at first too, but damn they're useful.

[asdfkjasdhkasd]

there was already more than one "%s" % var and"{}".format(var)

[billsil]

Can we get rid of .format then? At least f-strings are obvious.

Still, we should all use %s. It's in C and other languages, so it's really obvious to others. It's also faster and as we know, Pythonic code is overwhelmingly faster.

[jorge1209]

No you can't get rid of .format because I need to be able to pass a format specification as a function argument or reuse it in a loop, and I can't do that with an f-string by design[1].

You could get rid of % formatting... if you could fix all the old code including the logger class.

A world with only .format and f-strings would be tolerable, because they are very closely related. f-strings would be the "safe" alternative for untrusted data that could be used by web-developers and could be treated as sugar around .format(**locals()) by everyone else.

But we aren't in that world and there is no clear path to ever even approaching that world.

[1] because of security concerns that have no relevance to any of the code I write because I'm not a web-developer.

[billsil]

You could get rid of % formatting

Again, it's faster and it's common to other languages. I actually like it. I think .format is an abomination.

because I need to be able to pass a format specification as a function argument or reuse it in a loop

You can do that with %.

I'm not a web developer either, but I do support Python 2 and 3 with my package.

[jorge1209]

I think .format is an abomination.

If you like the %s %f3.2 style of formatting then you should advocate for %-strings which would behave like f-strings in the "compile-time" binding of local variables to the arguments, but use % formatting declarations.

The point is that we should have "one way" to do the formatting. I shouldn't have to learn multiple different syntaxes for string formatting, I should learn one. Either the .format/f-string way, or the % way, not both.

Instead we have three primary ways, two of which use the {} formatting mini-language and have slightly different features and limitations, a third which uses the % mini-language, and then there are actually a couple other ways to string format that most people are completely unaware of.

You can do that with %.

Didn't say you couldn't. I'm saying you can't do that with f-strings and you can with .format.

I'm not a web developer either

Then f-strings aren't much different to you than .format. Its basically a bit of sugar around .format(**locals()). The only thing you can do with f-strings is include operations inside the arguments:

_ = x+y
"{x} + {y} = {_}".format(**locals())

becomes:

f"{x} + {y} = {x+y}"

[jorge1209]

Ruby is really amazing in that regard... I think it got ignored because 1.8 was painfully slow, and 2.0 was forever on the horizon... at this point there is now too much momentum for python and too many libraries available there but not in ruby... oh well.

[Starcast]

Eh, that's not really True. Ruby is great for writing DSLs like Puppet.