I’ve been working with Python for quite a while now and feel pretty fluent with it —
but let’s be honest… Python always has something up its sleeve 😄
So tell me 👇
- A Python feature that surprised you
- A weird quirk you discovered way too late
- A clean trick you wish you’d known earlier
- A “wait… Python can do that?” moment
No beginner stuff please 🫡
I’m genuinely curious to see what even experienced Pythonistas miss sometimes.
Drop your underrated Python knowledge below 🔥🐍
Top comments (1)
Here’s a niche Python gem most fluent devs sleep on: you can use contextlib.suppress to cleanly ignore specific exceptions without messy try-except-pass blocks—and it works beautifully for one-off error suppression in a Pythonic way.
Most seasoned Pythonistas reach for try: ... except SpecificError: pass when they need to ignore an expected exception (like FileNotFoundError when deleting a file that might not exist). But contextlib.suppress turns that into a concise, readable context manager that makes intent crystal clear.
Example: Clean Exception Suppression
What’s mind-blowing? It’s not just syntactic sugar—suppress is designed to handle edge cases gracefully (e.g., it doesn’t swallow unexpected exceptions) and integrates seamlessly with other context managers. I’ve met devs with 5+ years of Python experience who had no idea this existed—they just stuck with the old try-except-pass out of habit!
Bonus: You can even nest it or use it in one-liners for simple operations, keeping your code DRY without sacrificing readability.