Dataclasses are here. Now what?

1:30pm - 2:00pm on Saturday, October 6 in PennTop South

Scott Irwin

Audience Level:

All

Slides:

https://sjirwin.github.io/pygotham2108-dataclasses/#/

Watch:

https://youtu.be/zHY1oaYxxjA

Overview

The PEP 557 dataclasses module was added in Python 3.7 and so is one of the newest features of the language. Now that they are here, they bring a few questions with them. In this talk, we will explore some of those questions.

Description

The PEP 557 dataclasses module is one of the new features added in Python 3.7 and are a decorator which generates the boiler-plate code needed by a data container class. In addition to providing access to stored data values by name, they provide a easy mechanism for including additional features such as default values and customized ordering.

In this talk we will explore dataclasses from a data container perspective by asking several questions.

• How should one use dataclasses?
• What functionality do dataclasses provide?
• How do these features compare to existing data structures in the standard library like NamedTuple, and dict?
• What about the third-party package attrs?
• What are some additional features of dataclasses?
• When might one want to use dataclasses?