DjangoCon US 2018 - Easier Classes: Python Classes Without All The Cruft by Trey Hunner

DjangoCon US 2018 - Easier Classes: Python Classes Without All The Cruft by Trey Hunner When bundling up data, sometimes tuples and dictionaries don’t quite cut it. Python’s classes are powerful tools for data storage and manipulation, but it can take quite a bit of boilerplate code to make a well-behaved Python class. In this talk we’re going to discuss how a well-behaved class should work and take a look at a number of helper libraries for creating well-behaved classes. We’ll first see how to make classes with proper string representations, comparability, iterability, and immutability. Then we’ll dive into helper tools built-in to the standard library and available in third-party libraries and briefly discuss which of these tools makes sense to use with Django’s classes. We’ll look at namedtuple, NamedTuple (not a typo), attrs, and the new Python 3.7 dataclasses. Most of the libraries discussed in this talk are only available in Python 3, so if you’re not using Python 3, hopefully this talk will encourage you to upgrade.