[jonathrg]

dicts are used internally in the language to look up class and module attributes. They are optimized for this use case. How can it be wrong to use them that way when the very fabric of the language depends on it?

namedtuple is widely used in Python code, especially before the introduction of dataclasses.

[jpc0]

A hash function will always be more expensive than a pointer lookup, specially concidering a pointer lookuo is still needed after the hash function.

No matter what you do, a lookup into an array will always be quicker than a hash lookup if you don't need to do a linear search, even in a lot of cases the linear search will be quicker.

Structs in other languages is a lookup of pointer + and offset. Which to my knowledge is also true in python classes using __slots__. There's no reason to use a dict if you know the contents of the data, use a dataclass with slots=True purely because there's no hash function run on every lookup into the datastructure.

[sickblastoise]

It’s not wrong to use dicts, it’s just bad practice when you could use something like a dataclass or pydantic model instead.

Dicts are useful for looking things up, like if you have a list bunch of objects that you need to access and modify, you should use a dict.

If you are using the dict as a container like car={“make”:”honda”,”color”:”red”}, you should use a proper object like a class, dataclass, or pydantic model based on whether you need validation, type safety, etc. This drastically reduces bugs and code complexity, helps others reason about your code, gives you access to better tooling etc.

[cruffle_duffle]

Right? I thought pretty much all the higher level “objecty” stuff in python are dicts under the hood.