Do you feel like you understand how Python works under the hood? What is syntactic sugar, and how much of it should be in Python? This week on the show, we have Brett Cannon. Brett is a Python core developer and he’s been working on a series of articles where he is unraveling the syntax of Python. His series is a fantastic resource for those wanting to learn how Python is structured and works at its core.

Brett wants to see a version of Python that can run in web browsers, so he started to breakdown Python into its syntactic elements to try to answer the question, what are core elements of Python? His detailed series takes the reader along for the ride.

Brett also works at Microsoft as the dev manager for the Python extension for VS Code. Brett is also serving his third term on the Python steering council, and we discuss recent Python enhancement proposals (PEP) that the council is considering.

Course Spotlight: Cool New Features in Python 3.9

In this course, you’ll explore some of the coolest and most useful features in the newly released Python 3.9. You’ll learn how Python 3.9 makes it easier to work with time zones, dictionaries, decorators, and several other techniques that will make your code cleaner and more efficient.

Topics:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:01:43 – Working on the Python extension for VSCode
00:04:17 – Microsoft and the Python community
00:07:19 – How long have worked on core Python?
00:11:49 – Ways to contribute to core Python
00:14:19 – Upcoming features and PEPs
00:15:41 – Pattern matching PEPs
00:17:48 – Sponsor: Digital Ocean
00:18:29 – Being a member of the Python Steering Council
00:21:10 – Unravelling Python’s syntatic sugar series
00:24:39 – Magic methods, dunder methods, or special methods
00:27:07 – Are there ways that syntatic sugar can be overused?
00:33:31 – WebAssembly and Python being available in the browser
00:45:51 – Does Circuit Python or MicroPython show a path?
00:52:37 – Video Course Spotlight
00:53:41 – Taking Python syntax down to the implementation layer
01:03:21 – Taking apart Python’s syntax
01:16:07 – What other parts of Python syntax will you be unravelling?
01:24:04 – What are you excited about in the world of Python?
01:26:46 – What do you want to learn next?
01:31:24 – Thanks and goodbye

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