It seems to me like the advantage to focus on here is the improved error / `None` handling, which will speed debugging and make handling expected edge cases easier. I've seen a lot of inexperienced developers tripped up entirely by this kind of data access, and seen plenty of experienced developers waste time debugging it because of the exact error cases the announcement references.
The `T` object, which the article describes as its most powerful, can be a useful pattern in some situations, but it's worth pointing out it isn't new or unique to this project.
The author says in another thread here that he first started working on the "stuff leading up to glom" in 2013. One older example, which is virtually identical though less complete, is this Stack Overflow answer I posted in 2012: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9920723/500584
I'd seen the general pattern even before that post, if not the Pythonic syntax. I don't think that it's much of an improvement over defining a `lambda`, so again I would say the thing to focus on is the improved debugability and the simpler, dot-notation-as-generic-attribute-or-item-accessor syntax. I think `T` is largely a distraction, or should be reserved for advanced users.
I would like to see the author debugging an application with 10 levels of object wrapping that had one of the middle object’s name misspelled.
Libraries like these shine only if they have brilliant tracing and debugging capabilities; otherwise are too easy to reduce to literally a single function.
affordances to add tracing prints, or drop into a pdb at any level
The Inspect specifier type provides a way to get visibility into glom’s evaluation of a specification, enabling debugging of those tricky problems that may arise with unexpected data.
Inspect can be inserted into an existing spec in one of two ways. First, as a wrapper around the spec in question, or second, as an argument-less placeholder wherever a spec could be.
Inspect supports several modes, controlled by keyword arguments. Its default, no-argument mode, simply echos the state of the glom at the point where it appears:
The `T` object, which the article describes as its most powerful, can be a useful pattern in some situations, but it's worth pointing out it isn't new or unique to this project.
The author says in another thread here that he first started working on the "stuff leading up to glom" in 2013. One older example, which is virtually identical though less complete, is this Stack Overflow answer I posted in 2012: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9920723/500584
I'd seen the general pattern even before that post, if not the Pythonic syntax. I don't think that it's much of an improvement over defining a `lambda`, so again I would say the thing to focus on is the improved debugability and the simpler, dot-notation-as-generic-attribute-or-item-accessor syntax. I think `T` is largely a distraction, or should be reserved for advanced users.