On Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 06:26:28PM +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
Ultimately, SimpleNamespace is useless if it can't be found.
"Can't" be found is an exaggeration. The std lib is full of little gems, and people learn them and use them. Generally when people talk about something that "can't be found" they mean *undocumented* features, like simplegeneric in pkgutil, which became the inspiration for functools.singledispatch. (And even then, some people obviously did find it.)
If people looking for this are not going to look in types, then either people need to be educated (good luck with that - you can't fight human nature), or it needs to be placed where people will find it.
Of course we can fight human nature. That's what education, school, manners, coding standards, documentation, codes of conduct, laws and community mores are all about. The fact that hardly anyone chased me down the street today with an antelope thighbone to bash my head in is, I think, good evidence that we have mostly been successful. We can't force people to look in `types`, but I don't think that the problem is that they refuse to. It's that they don't know about it's existence. We don't make everything a builtin because people might not know glob; "people don't know about the types module and don't think to look in there" is likewise a weak argument for moving SimpleNamespace into another module. It is an argument, but a weak one. Given that SimpleNamespace objects aren't a collection, they don't meet the collection API, I think that I'm -0.5 on that change. https://docs.python.org/3/library/collections.abc.html A Collection is sized, iterable, and supports `in`; SimpleNamespace supports none of those.