Its weird an article written about this now, has no mention of https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0443/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0443/ (skrause ment

Its weird an article written about this now, has no mention of https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0443/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0443/ (skrause mentioned the standard library docs for this https://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html#functools.singledispatch https://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html#functools.s... a few minutes ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22346433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22346433 ) It's especially weird to me, since single dispatch generic functions would do quite a lot of what he shows in the article, without having to build it all from scratch. I mean if you need more than what the standard library tools for multiple dispatch will let you have, then sure build your own, but I definitely echo nickserv's sentiments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22346235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22346235 ... This kind of hand rolled alternative to something in the standard library is not something you should end up doing as a last resort, its usually more trouble than it's worth. When you do need it, you should be documenting the hell out of not just what it does, but why you had to do it yourself. Edit for general knowledge sharing reasons: I just noticed the nice update to the built in functools.singledispatchmethod (https://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html#functools.singledispatchmethod https://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html#functools.s...) that came with Python 3.7, it now supports registering arguments using type annotations. I can already think of a few places where I could go back and clean up some code by removing a bunch of now unnecessary code doing "if isinstance(foo, str):" checks.