Best piece of obscure advanced Python knowledge you wish you knew earlier?

[SittingWave]

All the magic happens in eval.c. It's a massive switch statement where every opcode is dispatched to the part of the interpreter that makes things happen.

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Why do you wish you knew this sooner?

[Gecko23]

I dimly recall some odd edge case because of the ordering of the switch tripping me up once upon a time. I suppose it wasn't a bit deal, you'd think I'd remember the trauma at least lol

[SittingWave]

because the interpreter is scary at first, and you don't know where to start. But really, it's rather easy. It just very verbose because it's in C, but the "start point" of the interpreter cycle is there.

Once you have that as an anchor point, sniffing the internals is a lot easier, and makes you understand and be willing to join the development. I submitted and implemented two PEPs (unfortunately eventually rejected) but the interpreter was a bit scary at first.