This one's hot off the press as the first beta for Python 3.14 (aka. π-thon) has hit. We're looking at a chunky release with a lot of new features. But all I can think about are these new template strings (officially t-strings).

PEP-750 officially introduces the concept. The idea …

You're probably thinking that there are already plenty of tools written in Python.

But I see that most of the popular tools like mypy and flake8 are built for development environments. In contrast, general purpose cli tools tend to be built in other languages, for example most of the docker …

I've been a little obsessed with operator overloading lately. First using |= in sqlalchemy-builder and then using | and @ in better-functools.

I didn't actually know that these qualify as DSLs, specifically what's known as "internal DSLs". Funnily enough, I'm usually not a fan of DSLs. A few reasons come to mind:

• DSLs …

I recently put some effort into creating better-functools. It's a package that adds some tooling for functional programming in Python. And allows us to write some unique looking code in a manner similar to functional languages:

Try in sandbox

Why?

At a glance this doesn't look very "Pythonic". More complex …

This one has frustrated me for a while.

It starts off with a REST API route. For example in fastAPI

@app.get("/")
def search_users(session: Session) -> list[User]:
    """Finds users optionally filter by user_id"""
    statement = select(User).order_by(User.name)
    return session.execute(statement).scalars().all()

Then we get asked …

Structural pattern matching is probably the coolest new syntax introduced to Python. Added in 3.10, it's been a few years now and more people are writing apps in 3.10* than any other version now.

Though even with the wide adoption of 3.10 and more people being exposed …

Introduction

I wrote about free-threading recently in How free are threads in Python now?. Where I found some unexpected difficulties parallelising my solution.

In the conclusion section I wrote:

I'm starting to think that the approach sub-interpreters is taking, with brand new concurrency primitives and shared memory data structures has …

Free-threaded Python (PEP-703) was released in October 2024. It enables true multi-threaded execution without the restriction of the GIL.

I previously covered this in Free Threaded Python With Asyncio, the example used there was selected because it very clearly demonstrates the performance increase, or moreover, the threads "running free".

But …

I've been doing advent of code again this year. There are two Python features I always rely on, iterators and pattern matching. Iterators allow for operations on each of its elements without allocating memory for a collection. Ever since pattern matching was introduced in Python 3.10, it's been particularly …

I've been experimenting with Langchain for GPT based queries. One problem we often encounter with GPT is hallucinations. This makes certain classes of problems unsuited to GPT, one example is maths and statistics. Whilst there are improvements for recent models often the maths cannot be trusted.

When I try to …