[Python-ideas] Augmented assignment syntax for objects.

[Paul Moore]

On 28 April 2017 at 14:07, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Am I missing some point?
>
> Yes, the point I attempted to raise earlier: at the language design
> level, "How do we make __init__ methods easier to write?" is the
> *wrong question* to be asking. It's treating the symptom (writing an
> imperative initialiser is repetitive when it comes to field names)
> rather than the root cause (writing imperative initialisers is still
> part of the baseline recommendation for writing classes, and we don't
> offer any supporting infrastructure for avoiding that directly in the
> standard library)
[...]

Ah, OK. I see what you're saying here. I agree, that's the direction
we should be looking in. I'd sort of lumped all of that side of things
in my mind under the header of "must take a look at attrs" and left it
at that for now. My mistake.

So basically yes, I agree we should have better means for writing
common class definition patterns in a declarative way, retaining the
current underlying mechanisms while making it so that people typically
don't need to interact with them. I suspect that those means will
probably take the form of stdlib/builtin support (decorators, custom
base classes, etc) but the design will need some thrashing out. Beyond
that, I don't really have much more to add until I've done some
research into the current state of the art, in the form of libraries
like attrs (and Stephan Hoyer mentioned typing.NamedTuple).

Paul