Python decorators look like a great way to add functionality—until they break your type safety, hide function requirements, and turn debugging into a nightmare. This video shows you why decorators can be dangerous, the biggest pitfalls to watch out for, and when you should actually use them.
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“Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
Because “considered harmful” essays are, by their nature, so incendiary, they are counter-productive both in terms of encouraging open and intelligent debate, and in gathering support for the view they promote.
At any rate, they don’t have to break type safety anymore with PEP 612
I feel like Bertrand Russel trying to figure out whether the essay you posted is actually harmful then…
Sometimes people get excited to write fancy code, when they should actually be excited to write simpler code.
I can live with decorators in Python (and JavaScript while we’re at it) because they’re kind of in the spirit of the language. You have a big bag of tools and are trusted to use them responsibly.
I’ve only had problems when annotations in Java are used to do similar things. At some point you have to admit that all the bypassing of language features means you picked the wrong language, and maybe you don’t want rigorous OO purity after all.
“X Considered Harmful” considered harmful.
