The Stupid Python Workshop

Spend time using and abusing advanced features of Python, for fun, with little consideration of what is a good or bad idea.

Developers avoid using advanced language features because they don’t want to write code that is difficult to understand. Don’t be one of those developers! Come on an adventure to push Python syntax to its limits.

This workshop is aimed at intermediate Python developers. Attendees should be comfortable with Python’s syntax and should be intrigued or confused by: magic methods; how @property works; and what on Earth a metaclass is. Attendees will learn how these things work, starting with the more straightforward features. I’ll introduce each concept assuming the attendees have never used them before.

We’ll be writing silly and bad things. We aim to understand how they work, not whether they are a good idea, but in each case there will be a brief discussion of what each feature was really designed for. The exact contents are not confirmed, but should include some or all of the following:

• Override operators for more flexible syntax.
• Using __new__ for fun and profit.
• Functions that behave differently depending on the values in the caller’s scope.
• Tacking extra methods on to classes we don’t own.
• Abuse of the descriptor protocol.
• Messing with imports.
• Decorators that do things decorators were never meant to do.
• Write a metaclass and see if the world ends.