On: Python idioms I wish I'd learned earlier

[raverbashing]

Read the manuals! ;)

There's a lot of hidden gems.

Your idea is nice in a syntactic sugar way, also, the default being a part of the dictionary rather than the get function makes it copyable.

I'll give you another gem that could be interesting: else clause in for loops

[surreal → raverbashing]

Also read other people's code :) You'll see this being used countless times in libraries / on GitHub.