Moved

Moved. See https://slott56.github.io. All new content goes to the new site. This is a legacy, and will likely be dropped five years after the last post in Jan 2023.

Tuesday, March 17, 2020

70% of Modern Python Cookbook 2e...

At this point, we're closing in on 9/13 (70%) of the way through the 2nd edition rewrite.

Important changes.
  1. Type Hints
  2. Type Hints
  3. Type Hints
First. Every single class, method, or function has to be changed to add hints. Every. Single. One. This is kind of huge. The book is based on over 13,000 lines of example code in 157 files. A big bunch of rewrites.

Second. Some things were either wrong or at least sketchy. These rewrites are important consequences of using type hints in the first place. If you can't make mypy see things your way, then perhaps your way needs rework.

Third. dataclasses, frozen dataclasses, and NamedTuples have some nuanced overlapping use cases. Frequently, they differ only by small type hint changes.

I hate to provide useless non-advice like "try them and see which works for you." However, there's only so much room to try and beat out a detailed list of consequences of each alternative. Not every decision has a clear, prescriptive, "do this and you'll be happy." Further, I doubt any reader needs detailed explanations of *potential* performance consequences of mutable vs. immutable objects.

Also. I'm very happy cutting back on the overwrought, detailed explanations. This is (a) not the only book on Python, and (b) not my only book. When I started the first drafts 20 years ago, I wrote as though this was my magnum opus, a lifetime achievement.  A Very Bad Idea (VBI™).

This is a resource for people who want more depth. At work, I spend time coaching people who call themselves advanced beginners. The time spent with them has helped me understand my audience a lot better, and stuck to useful exposition of the language features.