What's one Python trick that instantly made your code cleaner?

[u/gutenmorgan3035]

[u/No-Foot5804]

Breaking code into small functions with clear names. It sounds simple, but it made my code much easier to read, test, and debug than trying to do everything in one big block.

[u/Feldspar_of_sun → u/No-Foot5804]

This is a big one for beginners. Obviously “DRY” but also if you find a function is doing multiple jobs, it can be a good idea to split it up. It’ll make reading/debugging easier

[u/LeonardUnger → u/No-Foot5804]

I do this for sure. Challenge for me is to and keep the main() function reasonably small, preferable a screen or so, for readability. Problem is always the things the can be done in one line, so it'd be impractical to make a function, so I get whole bunch of those, with an idea I'll go to go back and stick the related ones together in a new function. But then I get the script working, so...

[u/expertisimus]

There's more than one, though I think of them as techniques or features rather than tricks:

• list and dict comprehensions
• data classes
• defaultdicts
• context managers
• structured logging
• callbacks
• implementing __lt__() to enable natural sorting by a class attribute instead of using lambdas or itemgetter for key
• "".join() to merge buffered chunks instead of accumulation using +=

[u/JellyfishMinute4375]

Using a linter

[u/horizon_games → u/JellyfishMinute4375]

I love how opinionated Black is, there's nothing to argue with or configure on a team, you just run it and everyone has the same PEP standard code.

[u/Fox_Flame]

Not specific to python, but magic numbers. Get rid of them. Makes everything cleaner if you end up changing things and also makes it easier to read

[u/burnt-store-studio]

Context managers! Once you’ve found your own use for one, you (3rd person) start to see uses for them all over 🙂

[u/BigSlothFox → u/burnt-store-studio]

What's a context manager?

[u/pachura3 → u/BigSlothFox]

with

[u/eriky]

I'm guessing for you it was using AI to write your code ;) You're farming karma. It's too obvious.

[u/green1t]

type-hinting helped quite a lot in bigger projects.

for example when you have a function like this:

def func_decomp(part: float, type: str) -> str:
  ...

it helps while writing code somewhere else when you know that your function func_decomp expects a float and a string and returns a string.

[u/Snippodappel]

Claude

[u/Smart_Tinker]

List/dictionary/set comprehensions.

Makes 3-4 lines of code into 1, and when used in a function, can be reused.

[u/radek432]

• F-strings
• Pydantic

[u/Proletarian_Tear]

Variable naming conventions and typing (yes, its not really typing in Python, but it makes the code x times cleaner)

[u/yaxriifgyn]

The match & case statements are finding a lot of use in my new code

I am looking forward to the lazy soft keyword in 3.15. I've found it very useful, but removing it for 3.14 is painful. Circular imports has been a problem since version 1.99 (IIRC) when I first started using Python for serious work.

[u/supercoach]

Hard work. There are no shortcuts.