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Comment by xcmark | Hacker News Reader

Interesting list. I need none of it except the guaranteed dict insertion order!

But of course, I have to learn all of it to understand other people's code. Python's syntax has really gotten worse. The match statement is ugly in comparison to functional languages, I'm not sure about f-strings, the with-statement extension adds new overhead to the reader.

Python is really like C++ now, except 50 times slower (yes, I know about the slow std::unordered_map special case that is due to its rigid specification).

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> Python is really like C++ now

Yet there is still a common belief among programmers that “Python is a simple language”. I don’t know how that persists.

Perhaps what people really mean is just that it has “friendly” syntax (no braces, sigils etc) - and they aren’t considering semantics?

f”strings” are really good now.

Agree that match is shite, Python has a Guido-induced antagonism towards functional programming, starting with the opposition to multi-line lambdas, then with the attempted assassination of map() and filter() in Python 3, the removal of argument pattern matching, and now with statement-based match (in 2024!).

I agree with the other comments - f-strings are worth using. Other than that, um, underscores in numeric literals are nice, especially for hex and binary.

I don’t think there’s anything else there that I want to use. But, I recognise that as someone who only uses Python for small dynamically-typed programs, I’m not the target audience for the language any more.

If nothing else, do adopt f-strings. It really makes the code cleaner!

They are on average great, but don't you agree that it's not always better? If the expressions get too long, it gets less readable than splitting the placeholders from those expressions.

This is a tool, for use in certain circumstances. Screwdrivers are great, but you don't always use them.

Some of the linters don't know that and enforce f-strings. I know, we can't let the tools decide but sometimes that's just what happens at a workplace..

IMO @dataclass, and Enum are gamechangers. fstrings are nice too.

The walrus operator is pretty nice to have, the type system is absolutely necessary to improve correctness, and there are a few quality of life improvements that are great too, for example removeprefix().

I agree that f-strings have gone to town with itself. I do like the parenthesis support for with-statement, though: it gives more structural support instead of splitting lines with trailing back slashes--I always have an uneasy feeling about trailing back slashes.

Yes, I also only need 20% of the language. The problem is that everyone needs a different 20%.

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