[aeruder]

An article about the "attrs" library was posted here a couple weeks ago. Really highlighted the tedium of Python objects while offering a neat solution.

https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2016/08/attrs.html

Regarding protobuf, I'm a bit disappointed with the direction of version 3. Fields can no longer be marked as required - everything is optional; i.e. almost every protobuf needs to be wrapped with some sort of validator to ensure that necessary fields are present. I understand the arguments, but I did enjoy letting protobuf do the bulk of the work making sure fields were present.

[tantalor]

Required fields are bad; don't use them.

You should be very careful about marking fields as required. If at some point you wish to stop writing or sending a required field, it will be problematic to change the field to an optional field – old readers will consider messages without this field to be incomplete and may reject or drop them unintentionally. You should consider writing application-specific custom validation routines for your buffers instead.

https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto#sp...

[lmm]

They're a tradeoff. Sometimes you really are confident enough that this attribute will be required forever that the saving of not having to write custom validation is worth it.

[StavrosK]

That's a really interesting article, thank you!

EDIT: I liked it so much that I posted it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12359522

[kazagistar]

How, if at all, does attrs interact with serialization and deserialization?