Advanced Python Features

Summary

Python is one of the most widely adopted programming languages in the world. Yet, because of it’s ease and simplicity to just “get something working”, it’s also one of the most underappreciated. If you search for Top 10 Advanced Python Tricks on Google or any other search engine, you’ll find tons of blogs or LinkedIn articles going over trivial (but still useful) things like generators or tuples. However, as someone who’s written Python for the past 12 years, I’ve come across a lot of really interesting, underrated, unique, or (as some might say) “un-pythonic” tricks to really level up what Python can do. That’s why I decided to compile the top 14 of said features alongside examples and additional resources if you want to dive deeper into any of them. These tips & tricks were originally featured as part of a 14-day series on X/Twitter between March 1st and March 14th (pi-day, hence why there are 14 topics in the article). All X/Twitter links will also be accompanied with a Nitter counterpart. Nitter is a privacy-abiding open source Twitter frontend. Learn more about the project here. Table of Contents 1. Typing Overloads Original X/Twitter Thread | Nitter Mirror @overload is a decorator from Python’s typing module that lets you define multiple signatures for the same function. Each overload tells the type checker exactly what types to expect when specific parameters are passed in. For example, the code below dictates that only list[str] can be returned if mode=split, and only str can be returned if mode=upper. (The Literal type also forces mode to be either one of split or upper) from typing import Literal, overload @overload def transform(data: str, mode: Literal["split"]) -> list[str]: ... @overload def transform(data: str, mode: Literal["upper"]) -> str: ... def transform(data: str, mode: Literal["split", "upper"]) -> list[str] | str: if mode == "split": return data.split() else: return data.upper() split_words = transform("hello world", "split") # Return type is...