Fluent Python, 2nd Edition

Afterword

Python is a language for consenting adults.

Alan Runyan, cofounder of Plone

Alan’s pithy definition expresses one of the best qualities of Python: it gets out of the way and lets you do what you must. This also means it doesn’t give you tools to restrict what others can do with your code and the objects it builds.

At age 30, Python is still growing in popularity. But of course, it is not perfect. Among the top irritants to me is the inconsistent use of CamelCase, snake_case, and joinedwords in the standard library. But the language definition and the standard library are only part of an ecosystem. The community of users and contributors is the best part of the Python ecosystem.

Here is one example of the community at its best: while writing about asyncio in the first edition, I was frustrated because the API has many functions, dozens of which are coroutines, and you had to call the coroutines with yield from—now with await—but you can’t do that with regular functions. This was documented in the asyncio pages, but sometimes you had to read a few paragraphs to find out whether a particular function was a coroutine. So I sent a message to python-tulip titled “Proposal: make coroutines stand out in the asyncio docs”. Victor Stinner, an asyncio core developer; Andrew Svetlov, main author of aiohttp; Ben Darnell, lead developer of Tornado; and Glyph Lefkowitz, inventor of Twisted, joined the conversation. Darnell suggested a solution, Alexander Shorin explained how to implement ...