The When of Python Blog

Guidance on when to use Python features (and when not to).
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Articles


Get the Hint - Type Hinting is Common Python

How we handle type hinting will define the future of Python for good or bad. Type hinting is useful as glorified commenting and as such should be part of everyone's Everyday Python. It should be part of Common Python. Type hinting is likely to be widely used in the code people encounter so we all need to be comfortable reading simple type hinting. Some enterprise and library codebases will benefit from a more strict and enforced form of type "hinting" and further advances in type hinting and checkers like mypy will improve the developer experience of using this feature. What has your experience of type hinting been? Do you agree with this post? Do you disagree? Please comment below.


Pickle in a Pickle

Python pickle is something many of us have had a love-hate relationship with. We've loved it before using it and hated it afterwards ;-) Maybe we should put pickle in the Deprecate Python category?



The Who of Python

Python is used by very different groups of people and how we decide which features are Common Python and which are Situational Python must take that into account. If something is common to one group only e.g. data scientists, or enterpise web application developers, it should be considered Situational Python - even if the use case is very common for that group.


Welcome to the When of Python

The When of Python is a fledgling community initiative. The goal is to effectively shrink Python so it fits our brains by providing guidance on when we should use particular language features (and when we should not).