Trey Hunner
Trey Hunner helps Python developers level-up their skills through corporate trainings and through self-paced Python learning with Python Morsels. Get in touch with Trey to improve your (or your team's) Python skills.
Session
In Python, assignment statements don't copy objects, and data structures don't actually contain objects. These two surprising facts have a lot of interesting consequences and are the reason behind many of Python's design decisions.
In this talk, we'll explore the reference-like nature of Python's variables and objects, noting both the benefits and gotchas involved.
Among other ideas, we'll see that in Python:
- The word "change" is ambiguous
- Copying is usually explicit
- Tuples aren't always immutable
During the process, we'll consider our own mental model of Python.
In Python, it's pointers (or references, names, bindings, or aliases) all the way down.