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Python Study Notes

The document contains personal Python study notes focusing on key concepts and common pitfalls encountered in backend projects. It covers topics such as list comprehensions vs generators, the importance of using functools.wraps in decorators, context managers, type hints, async pitfalls, and various Python tips. The author shares lessons learned from debugging issues related to mutable default arguments and late binding in lambdas.

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8 views2 pages

Python Study Notes

The document contains personal Python study notes focusing on key concepts and common pitfalls encountered in backend projects. It covers topics such as list comprehensions vs generators, the importance of using functools.wraps in decorators, context managers, type hints, async pitfalls, and various Python tips. The author shares lessons learned from debugging issues related to mutable default arguments and late binding in lambdas.

Uploaded by

novamediafpv
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© All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Python Study Notes — Misc

Personal notes from working through a few backend projects. Mostly things I keep forgetting
and have to look up.

List comprehensions vs generators


Comprehensions build the whole list in memory. Generators yield one at a time. For anything
iterating a file or a query result, generator. For anything you need to index into or pass around,
list. The square-bracket vs round-bracket difference is easy to miss in a code review.

Decorators and [Link]


Always use @[Link] in custom decorators or you lose the wrapped function's
__name__ and docstring, which breaks logging and Sphinx. Took me an hour to figure out
why my logs were full of 'wrapper' instead of the actual function name.

Context managers
[Link] turns a generator into a context manager. Useful for one-off
setup/teardown without writing a full class. Yield once, put cleanup in a finally block. Don't
yield twice or you get a RuntimeError.

Type hints I keep forgetting


Optional[X] is just shorthand for Union[X, None]. In 3.10+ you can write X | None instead,
which reads better. List[int] is now list[int] without the import. Callable signatures: Callable[[int,
str], bool] means takes int and str, returns bool.
Async pitfalls
[Link] is not a substitute for a task group when you need cancellation semantics.
[Link] (3.11+) is what you actually want most of the time. Forgetting to await a
coroutine returns a coroutine object and silently does nothing — Python only warns at GC
time.

Random Python tips


[Link](key, default) avoids KeyError. [Link](list) is cleaner than
checking-and-appending. enumerate(x, start=1) for 1-indexed loops. zip(*matrix) transposes a
matrix. [Link] (3.10+) gives you sliding pairs without manual indexing.

Things that bit me


Mutable default arguments. def f(x=[]) — that list is shared across all calls. Use None and
check inside. Late binding in lambdas inside a loop: every lambda captures the same loop
variable. Use a default argument to bind early: lambda x=i: x.

Last week I spent two hours debugging a cache that was 'returning the wrong values' when
the actual bug was a mutable default in a helper function written six months ago. The lesson
keeps not sticking.

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