Extra stuff like type checking and annotations are definitely not the reason why python became that popular and widely adapted and used, but it certainly doesn't hurt to add and use them.

To be clear, I'm not expecting people to start adding generics to their quick hacked together Python scripts (in fact please don't do that). Instead, if you're building a library or maintaining a larger Python codebase, a lot of these start becoming very useful. A lot of the typing features I mentioned are already used by Python under the hood, and that a lot of Python developers just take for granted.

Case in point, the python-opencv (https://github.com/opencv/opencv-python) library has basically no types and it's an absolute pain to work with.

BTW thats a really good SO thread, thanks for linking it!

In that example I gave, I totally agree with you. One area where I find walrus operators kinda useful is with dealing with iterators. For example,

'''

iterable = iter(thing)

while val := next(iterable, None): print(val)

'''

is a lot cleaner in my opinion compared to

'''

iterable = iter(thing)

val = next(iterable, None) while val is not None: print(val) val = next(iterable, None)

'''

Reason why I did not use this example outright was because I wasn't sure if people were familiar with the iter api, so I just chose a simpler example for the blog.

Hey yall! Original author of the blog here!

I did not expect to wake up at 4am seeing my post on front page HN, but here we are nevertheless :D

As the intro mentioned, these started off as 14 small tweets I wrote a month prior to starting my blog. When I finally got that set up, I just thought, "hey, I just spent the better part of two weeks writing these nifty Python tricks, might as well reuse them as a fun first post!"

That's why the flow might seem a little weird (as some pointed out, proxy properties are not really a Python "feature" in of itself). They were just whatever I found cool that day. I tried to find something more esoteric if it was a Friday, and something useful if it was a Monday. I was also kinda improving the entire series as it was going on, so that was also a factor.

Same goes with the title. These were just 14 feature I found interesting while writing Python both professionally and as a hobby. Some people mentioned these are not very "advanced" per se, and fair enough. I think I spent a total of 5 second thinking of a title. Oh well!